>

EX

LIBRIS.

ERNEST

FREDERICK

GYE.

r

THE TOWER OF
THE MIRRORS

WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

HORTUS VIT^ OR THE HANGING GARDENS

THE ENCHANTED WOODS

THE SPIRIT OF ROME

HAUNTINGS : FANTASTIC STORIES

THE SENTIMENTAL TRAVELLER

POPE JACYNTH AND OTHER FANTASTIC TALES

GENIUS LOCI: NOTES ON PLACES

LIMBO AND OTHER ESSAYS to which is added

ARIANDE IN MANTUA
LAURUS NOBILIS: CHAPTERS ON ART AND

LIFE
RENAISSANCE FANCIES AND STUDIES

THE DUCHESS OF ALBANY

ALTHEA : DIALOGUES ON ASPIRATIONS AND
DUTIES

VANITAS ; POLITE STORIES including A FRIVO-
LOUS CONVERSION

VITAL LIES: STUDIES OF SOME VARIETIES
OF RECENT OBSCURANTISM

BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

LONDON: JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD

Ex Libris
C. K. OGDEN

THE TOWER OF
THE MIRRORS

AND OTHER ESSAYS ON
THE SPIRIT OF PLACES

BY VERNON LEE

LONDON : JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW Y O K K : JOHN LANE COMPANY
TORONTO : BELL & COCKBUKN : MCMXIV

TFIE BALLANTYNE PRESS TAVISTOCR STREET COVENT GARDEN LONDON

LTRRARY
SANTA BAlJBAJiA

T3

^ UNIVER9TTY o^ rM,TFORNT\

DEDICATORY EPISTLE

To Mabel Price

By an inscrutable dispensation of the Printer,
the dedication to you of my former little volume
called Limbo, came to be dropped otit of its subse-
quent editions. The circumstance gave me extreme
annoyance xchen I became azvare of it. But the
loss {I mean loss to me and my book, of course, not
to you) has suggested a gain, the possibility of
replacing that old lapsed dedication by a new one,
namely the dedication which I am at this moment
writing.

And even if this new volume be not, as I should
wish, more worthy of your acceptance, it records,
at all events, many more places we have been at
together, and some fifteen years' additional perfect
comradeship in various remote or close at hand,
delectable spots of this, on the whole, best of all
possible zvorlds. And so, to our next happy
meeting and sallying-forth together to bring the
Genius Loci the oblation of our glad and reverent
spirit.

July 31, 1913 VerNOX Lee

CONTENTS

PAGB

Dedicatory Epistle

I. The Tower of the Mirrors 1
II. The Lizard in the Abbey Church 7

III. French Roads 13

IV. Chablis 19
V. SoROR ^Emulaque Romae 25

VI. The Hotel-Dieu of Beaune 33

VII. The Churches at Poitiers 43

VIII. Albi 49
IX. Sens and the Nun of the Bon

Pasteur 55

X. Bernese Lowlands 63

XI. Lavaters House at Zunicn 09

XII. The .\mazon on the Fountain 77

XIII. The Horse at Lenzburg 81

XIV. Steuzing am Brenner 85
XV. A Tyrolese Crucifix 93

XVI. Werther's Wetzlar 99

XVII. The CioosEBERiiY Garden of Jena 107

XMII. The Victor of Xanten 115

XIX. Three Old German Palaces 125

XX. The Salv.\torskirche at Coburg 135

XXI. The Grave of Wieland and the

>LvN in the Rain Ml

XXH. Castiglione d'Olona 147

XXIH. Convalescence at Pisa 155

XXIV. Bocca d'Arno in.'J

XXV. The Dockyard of Viareogio KiO

vii

viii CONTENTS

PAQE

XXVI, Vallombrosa 175

XXVII. Petrarch's House at Arqua 181

XXVIII. The Treasure of Venzone 189

XXIX. The Lagoon of Comacchio 197

XXX. Winter Days at Ravenna 201

XXXI. The Blind Singer of Saturnia 209

XXXII. The False Vetralla 221

XXXIII. The Scottish Prince on the

Apennine Top 225
XXXIV. Divinities of Tuscan Summer

Fields 281
XXXV. Monte Argentario or the Man

Who Slept in the Train 237

THE TOWER OF
THE MIRRORS

I

THE TOWER OF THE MIRRORS

I HAVE always been fond of that story of Virgil,

when he had turned wizard in the Middle Ages :

how he built for himself a tower— whose name

survives in a church at Rome — with mirrors

whereby you could see whatever happened in

the world's length and breadth. This Tower

of the Mirrors I have at last seen with my mortal

eyes.

It was a gusty day, with squalls of rain

rushing down the Forth, and flashes of blue sky.

You go up endless corkscrew steps into a little

round room, windowless and with closed-down

hatches ; your impression of being in some part

of an old-fashioned ship carried out by the blows

of wind overhead. There is just space to squeeze

in the dark between the rough stone wall and

a great flat disc, like a circular dining-table,

which takes up the whole cabin. And into this

disc you look, and, very soon, look with the

intentness of a crystal-gazer. For some one has

grasped a winch ; the pale, faintly luminous

surface of the table has begun to curdle, and you

gradually recognize that what you are gazing

down onto is, of all unlikely things, a piece of

1 i.

2 THE TOWER OF THE MIRRORS

sky overhead. There are weltering clouds in
slow, uncertain motion ; then a rift of blue, and
a long narrow gash, more luminous than the sky,
fringed, moreover, by something sharper than any
cloud outlines. But that this thing which is
beneath you, and which is at the same time the
sky, can also be the sea, becomes apparent only
after a far stranger thing has suddenly become
visible, throwing its dark jags across the mirror.
It is saw-edged, it is up and down, with here and
there a larger jag, crown-shaped or like a bird-
cage, barring the light. And as that jagged
line slowly rises, like magic fumes, upon the disc,
there comes to be added something else, dark
and shiny patternings below trembling outlines
of roofs and gables and towers silhouetted
Bgainst the sky ; a sort of inside, as it were, of
those outlines. It is, indeed, the inside of a town ;
roofs looked down upon along their steepness ;
racks of chimneys, and a wide shining gulf, across
which hurry black spots, which are men and
women. Men and women ! And the gulf is the
great castle-terrace, wet with a passing shower,
with the whole mediaeval town like the tail of St.
George's slain dragon, winding down from it.
Those streets flicker out of sight ; and other stacks
of roofs flit slowly by, with spires and domes.
The sea reappears ; headlands and rocks. The
town has vanished, and hilltops have slid into
view, bare, like tops of Alpine passes, misty
green after the plum- colour and orange of tiles
and slate. The hills subside, and there is nothing

THE TOWER OF THE MIRRORS 3

once more but weltering cloud with rifts of blue
and sudden crape of wind-driven rain. Then
the curdling ceases on the surface of the disc.
There is the click of the winch let go ; a hatch
opens, and the daylight shows merely a round
table of shiny grey metal.

We descend from the tower of the IMirrors,
built by Virgil, as we know, to see all there is
in the world. But not on the earth's surface
only, nor on this surface which we call the
Present. Here our eye can penetrate through
the dimensions of stellar space, and the dimen-
sions also, the many-vista'd planes, of Time.
On the tower-staircase hang huge globes, slung
askew as our world itself is. Also other globes,
more marvellous, inserting your head into
which you see, figured on the crapy black round-
ness, that other globe, the double vault of
heaven where this, our earth, is spinning. On
the tower-landings stand models showing what
we should see were the earth to become trans-
parent and display the continents and seas
beneath our feet. And other reliefs showing
the volcano-cones ground down by the ice, and
the estuaries being silted up. And everywhere,
on the parapets, the window-sills, the leads, are
inscribed signs telling in what direction we must
send out our fancy towards the great names of
the world. Alongside that clock-tower is the
crow's flight to Paris ; a little to the side, by
that wind-warped beech-knoll, is Mont Blanc ;
beyond it Rome, Athens, all the Antique Lands,

4 THE TOWER OF THE MIRRORS

the Pyramids. And the New World is stretched
yonder (hke a witch's hour-glass) across those
crags, where the afternoon clouds are crimsoned.

It seemed fit and proper that the Tower of the
Mirrors should have been set up by that modern
wizard, a man of science with a poet's soul, in just
such a place as Edinburgh. Or was it those
mirror-visions which first opened my eyes to
the amazing romance of that place ? those
Princes Street shop-fronts facing, across the
ravine filled with smoke of unseen trains, that
precipitous bluff, castled like some black Rhine -
rock, walls and turrets creeping up grassy slopes,
as in Ruskin's drawings of Swiss Fribourg.
More wonderful still, the way that wide, mediaeval
street of gabled houses runs downhill from the
Castle terrace (fit for Elsinore) to the Loire-
Chateau of Holyrood ; and there suddenly ends
off in the bare green crags, which might overtop
a pass of the Alps. Never was town more
closely compacted with its surrounding country,
nor country showing its handiwork of volcano
and ice and patient estuary siltings : an epitome,
in one tiny corner, of the elemental epic of our
globe's making.

That is the difference between this geographer's
tower and the places where the wizards of
Ariosto and Tasso evoked their processions of
crowned and 'sceptred figures out of the hazy
past or future : our modern imagination and
dramatic sympathy go far beyond such merely
human stories. And this place makes me

THE TOWER OF THE MIRRORS 5

think of those masterpieces of contemporary
imaginative painting, Besnard's decorations
in the ficole dc Pharmacic (to the back of the
Luxembourg gardens), not merely by the pale,
flat washes of its camera-obscura and the steep
plunging view over city and seaboard, but also
because, even as by those marvellous paintings,
we are given the emotions of looking into the
immense distances of geological ages, when the
ice was melting from the shores of the great
lakes, nay, when the first plant-life arose from
the subsiding sea's marshes.

That is why I had rather have climbed into
Professor Geddes's Tower of the Mirrors, even
than into the one which the poet Virgil, turned
wizard in the Middle Ages, built himself near the
Tarpeian rock, the better to know all that was
happening through the Empire of Rome.

Moreover this Tower of the Mirrors can flash a
symbolical meaning even into the metaphysical
depths of Being. The analogy thereof lets us
guess at the universal mirrorings by which all
outside things exist as we know them only in the
reflecting and refracting mirrors of our memory
and our emotions ; while yet those mirroring
surfaces of our spirit themselves exist, and pivot
to receive images, only in that universe which
themselves reflect. Nay the symbol may help us
to conceive that the mirroring material whereof
they are made, is eonsubstantial with the
universe reflected in their facets ; and that
the very modes of that refraction and deflection

6 THE TOWER OF THE MIRRORS

of Reality are but one of Reality's own modes
of existing and acting.

But leaving such metaphysics, and passing to
practical moralizings, the analogy of the Tower
of the Mirrors may bring home to us that, if we
would possess the world and its kingdoms, past,
present, and future, and not merely our own
image reflected in our own wash-pot, we must
take the trouble to ascend into towers, and
go to the expense of furnishing our soul with
as many mirrors as possible, and a steady, well-
oiled winch wherewith to turn them in some
directions and avert them from others.

II

THE LIZARD IN THE ABBEY
CHURCH

France once more, and at length the first
autumn morning. The straggHng village has
that French air of little, close-fisted, cossu
middle-class ; it looks as if inhabited, not by
peasants, but by notaries and receveurs, each with
his flower garden and prize fruit-trees. But a
man mending the road wears the characteristic
white shirt and French-blue peg-top trousers, like
in Bcsnard's allegorical paintings. And a farm-
house has a vine loosely hung over an archway,
in a manner almost Italian.

I have been sitting on a tree stump (last
winter's floods have thrown some poplars across
the stream, uprooted) by the river Serein ;
Scrcnus, the monks of the abbey called him, or
the Romans before them, and they named him
well : pale jade water moving slowly under
pollard willows, between rustling poplars, into
whose greyish-green autumn is mingling the
first yellow. And serene also is this country
of the Burgundian marches : the sweep of low
horizon under a pale sunny sky, enfolding in
luminous mists the vast plains, the whole

8 THE LIZARD IN

great continent one feels unseen beyond. The
wind in the poplars mimics a missing weir. A
flock of geese rise from the stream, shake wings,
and disappear in the grass ; and some ducks
are moored, asleep, where the fallen trees have
dammed and deepened the current.

Up there, beyond the scrubby apple-trees
on the stubble, and the low vineyards, rises the
white hulk of the Abbey church, like a huge
prowless ship, keel upwards. Of that great
Burgundian monastery — nay, of those four
great Cistercian foundations : Citeaux and Clair-
vaux and Morimont and Pontigny — it alone
remains intact, itself vast as a cathedral. It, and
the huge monastic granary ; and, beyond the
orchard, some Louis XV. pavilions, on what must
once have been the monastery's fortified walls.
With their steep roofs velveted over with moss
and long bright windows and dainty shallow
fireplaces in the panelled rooms, their terraces
and balustrades reminding you of the places
where Dives takes his pleasure in Venetian
pictures with dwarfs and bass-viol players and
stomacher'd ladies, these little buildings are
discreet yet not at all furtive, little maisons du
'pechd, one might say, but of sins venial, graceful,
and unhidden. One shudders to think of St.
Bernard's feelings, if he looks down upon these
only remaining habitations of his Cistercians !
But facing their eighteenth-century windows,
at the end of a neglected avenue of lime-trees,
looms the tall white gauntness of the abbey-

THE ABBEY CHURCH 9

church and the penthouse of its narthex. That
has not altered since St. Bernard saw it, and
must have seen in it the expression of his austere
and poetic ardour.

That great white church ! Entering from
the narthex, or vestibule, into its soaring empti-
ness, the stillness of the place, the up-lift of
those congregated columns, the fugucd vistas
of the pointed, turning aisles and choir, catch at
one's heart and make the breath stop. The
autumn sunlight lies in broad gashes across the
pale pure gloom ; and in it flit the shadows of
the swallows gathering round the roof and
turrets outside. Conformably to St. Bernard's
austerity, which growled and railed at the
splendours of the neighbouring abbey of Vezelay,
this church of Pontigny is totally unadorned.
The outside is in truth little more than a colossal
barn, the buttressed apse even having but little
shape, the narthex being but a huge shed, and
the only beauty about the thing being the work
of Time, which has tarnished its whiteness to
silver. St. Bernard wanted a mere shell for
the human souls within. But where there is
soul, there will needs be art, whether saints like
it or not. And the Gothic art of the thirteenth
century, sternly forbidden the sculpture which
sprouts like vine and ivy in these Burgundian
valleys, shaped that bleak bare church-empti-
ness into a figure more divine than any of its
sculptors ever carved iu the image of man.
There is now a crucified Christ over the rood-

10 THE LIZARD IN

screen ; and a saint, a saint great, Edmund of
Canterbury, lies enshrined in the high altar.
But these are poor, paltry excuses ! The real
divinity is the white, vast emptiness itself, the
pale sunlight gathered up into great clustered
pillars and bent like beech-wood into hooped
white vaultings ; the building is a phantom,
a dead and haunting Godhead who draws you
to his secret heart.

Nowadays it has become the parish church of
a tiny village, half of whose inhabitants are
unbelievers, and I had never found it other-
wise than empty. But Sunday afternoon,
wandering around, I thought I heard sounds
issuing faintly. And, pushing the door from
the narthex, I was met by the voice of the
church. It was only a dozen schoolboys and
villagers, in shabby holiday finery, occupying
a few of the oak stalls which some seventeenth-
century abbot, forgetful of St. Bernard, orna-
mented with cherubs and garlands. These
people and the priest were singing, and it could
scarcely be called music. But, as I stood in
the door, the chaunts in their archaic naked-
ness seemed the voice of the nude white building,
the audible chorus adding a part to the visible
counterpoint of the many-vista'd piers and
vaultings.

The following morning, when the abbey church
was once more deserted, I spent most of my time
there in dealings with a lizard. I found it
between the steps leading down from the narthex

THE ABBEY CHURCH 11

and the first pier of the left aisle, lying against the
stone wainscoting, a flattish brown thing, which
I took at first for one of those creatures haunting
old masonry, and falsely called tarantula in
Italy, where they are reputed to be venomous.
I expected it to disappear into some hole, and
prodded it idly to hasten its retreat. But it
moved slowly, stopi:)ing to take note of possible
crannies, without making for any one of them.
Then I noticed that it had caught its hind legs
and tail in a kind of string hindering its progress,
trying to loosen which I became aware that the
creature was wrapped round and trammelled by
a mantle of dusty cobwebs. It proved to be a
field lizard, greenish, which must have entered
on Sunday while the doors stood open, and
was now vainly seeking an exit. I pushed it
slowly m the direction of the door, which I had
set ajar ; and then, seeing its inability to get up
the two steps into the narthex, and, indeed, its
utter weariness, I took it in my handkerchief and
set it down in the grass outside. But whether
from fright, or fatigue, or the clinging wrapper
of clerical cobwebs, the poor little brute, Apollo's
nimble playfellow (for the Praxitelian Saurok-
tonos is not slaying, only taming it with his
pipings !), merely flipped behind some weeds
and lay there like dead. This morning, how-
ever, returning to the church, I turned the grass
over without finding a trace of it, so I hope
that it washed the monastic foulness ofT in the
dew and returned to the vineyards ; unless,

12 THE LIZARD IN THE ABBEY CHURCH

indeed, it was put to death mercifully by one
of the swallows in their autumn hoverings.

The day, which after that radiant morning had
become covered and sad, is ending with a clear
sky once more. The vapours have dropped back
on to the horizon faintly reddened by the
invisible sunset. From the river meadows and
the stubblefields rise white gauzes of mist, in
which mingles the smoke of supper and of
burning weeds. Above a red farm-roof, the
moon, nearly full, floats white in the thin blue
air. The great abbey church seems asleep, its
high brown roof and turrets and buttresses
unsubstantial among the poplars. An hour
hence it will have vanished back into the distant
ages.

Ill

FRENCH ROADS

These wonderful French roads ! They run as
straight as a ruler could make them, across high-
lying plains and up and down steep coteaux,
barely swerving in the little valleys where grass
and willows steep in the wide flush rivers. These
great, smooth, white roads look as if they had
been made not for real armies but rather for the
promenades militaires of Louis XIV, with his
glass-coachfuls of mistresses and courtiers, his
camp-following of cooks and poets. And the
villages along these roads have evidently been
their consequence, not their cause : single lines
of neat, low white houses, silvery-slated and
attick'd, like so many stables and communs
of chateaux set along the straight white road at
the right distance for coaching relays ; the
king's highway leaving unnoticed, unhelped,
and far ofl', heaven knows where inland (hidden
in woods and orchards) the real villages which
had been there before its day, and which, in
less monarchical countries, captured the roads
and made them twist about in their service.
Indeed, these roadside villages of Touraine,
Poitou, and Maine, vine-draped or hedged with

13

14 FRENCH ROADS

old, old planes, are mostly churchless, and look
like straggling rows of seigneurial stables, pro-
longations of the post-house.

These thoughts recurred to me as we motored
from Tours to Le Mans. Our object was to see
Wilbur Wright fly, and we did : a colossal locust
rising from the sand and grass of a great
manoeuvring field, amidst pine and gorse and
dry heather, and flying, a steady whirring flight,
at the tree-tops' height for half an afternoon, till
the sun had set, and the mists began to rise.
There were lots of red-legged officers, and the
line was kept by dragoons in shabby undress
on ill-groomed beasts, as if a real campaign was
going on. Is it true, I wondered, as is thought by
some of my Utopian friends, that this grasshopper
of metal and canvas and a human heart is
destined to flout and rout, to banish into an
improbable barbarous past, the armies and
navies of the world, all that multitudinous
apparatus for murder and wastefulness ? The
solitary, silent, soaring thing making the odds
equal at last between the small States and the
large, the rich and the poor, giving victory to
skill and pluck alone, and abolishing warfare by
the mere threat of destruction raining down from
its wings ?

I repeated it all to myself. But I was tired
and footsore ; the whirring locust flight became
monotonous, and, being so near the ground, and
always in a circle, suggested a wire, something
inevitable and, literally, terre-a-terre, without

FRENCH ROADS 15

any of tlie adventurous appeal of a balloon.
The future, represented by the aeroplane,
ceased to attract my fancy. And I confess
to having felt a certain bitterness when we
drove into Le Mans to buy petrol and carbure,
and the great portals and flying buttresses
of the Cathedral loomed in the evening, at
having spent my afternoon looking at Wilbur
Wright instead of at the soap-bubble clusters of
chapels, the elephantine Norman nave, and the
wonderful tartan glass, whose scarlet and green
and inky purple shone wonderful in my memory.
The Future ! Yes, it will be agreeably free from
abuses and atrocities ; at least, one hopes so.
Rut will it ever build things like a great Gothic
church, or know, or care, how to make such
windows ?

Maybe my lack of optimism was due to lack of
tea. I need scarcely say that we got none.
Few things are more significant of the difference
between the Latin mind and the Teutonic than
this carelessness of afternoon refreshment. I
had forgotten the fact, and had, as a sense of
sinking and pessimism warned me, brought with
me some feeble Anglo-Saxon expectation of a kind
of improvised race-stand (for we came furnished
with tickets), not without tea-tents ; or, in
default of this, of some basket presently to be
drawn from the motor's secret places. Rut,
although the skirt of the pine-woods was strewn
with horrible old papers, and there was a show
of huvettes on wheels for cyclists and foot-

16 FRENCH ROADS

passengers from Le Mans, all that we got — or
that I got through the enterprising pity of one of
my French friends — was a chunk of dry bread,
out of which we excavated thumbfuls by turns
as the motor waited for the last whirring flight to
end triumphantly among the sunset-reddened
pines. At Le Mans the inns and restaurants were
besieged by people come from every quarter to
see Wright fly. So no attempt was made
to have any supper, and the only refreshments
purchased were, as already said, petrol and
wherewithal to make acetylene, which smells
like garlic but is, unfortunately, a mineral
substance. But my base Teutonic miseries were
more than compensated by a tardy dinner at
a roadside inn. It was at Chateau du Loir ; let
me never forget its romantic name and comforting
substantiality ! For that excellent dinner, with
its civet de lievre, its various indigestible French
delicacies and exquisite bread, in the long empty
room (it was by this time nine o'clock) of an
old posting inn, summed up, as a taste or a smell
sometimes will, the charm of the long motor
drive in the moonlight.

And through the moonlight we drove on, along
the interminable straight road, with its bordering
vineyards and apple-trees, clear though colour-
less ; through the little tidy towns, still alight,
where the shopkeepers and apprentices were
sitting over supper ; through the low white
villages, shuttered and asleep behind their rows
of plane-trees. White vapours were rising from

FRENCH ROADS 17

the river-side meadows, and the shadows of the
road's poplars cut through them as w^e rushed
alonff. And everv now and then, the motor
being hickily seized with mysterious indisposi-
tion, there was a long halt between the low woods,
steeped in moon-mist, and whence came, making
a little hole in the silence, the cry of an owl or the
distant shot, scarcely less gentle, of some
poacher's gun ; the woods, which had met us
at noon with warm fragrance of dried heather
and belated gorse-bloom, now giving out only
chill mystery under the white, full moon.

Tours was dead and black, even the cafes
extinguished, as we woke its echoes ; and it
must have been close on midnight when we got
back to the shining slate-roofs and the pepper-
pot turrets of the hospitable Commanderie.

IV
CHABLIS

The name has stood in my mind for the wine
wliich, of all others perhaps, tastes most of Flora
and the Country Green ; or, rather, whose
flavour seems least unworthy of the captivating
scent of the flowering vine, such as it meets one,
bitter yet honeyed, in the evening coolness after
a June day. I had a small glass of this wine for
gouicr, along with certain excellent though
austere peiits sables, at the tidy inn of Chablis.
And once again, as with this same wine some
years ago at Dijon (it was my birthday celebrated
in solitude by such unused indulgence), I thanked
my gouty abstinence for keeping keen in my
mind and palate the beneficent grace of such
wines as these, and how much of poetry they seem
to have distilled.

That was what the name Chablis used to mean.
Henceforward it will stand for one of the
sweetest little towns of a type especially French,
set in a landscape of vineyard slopes and pure
poplared river, and seen on an autumn day of
sunshine, silvery among aftermath, a day fit to
give ripening grapes their finishing turn.

Among other sights at Chablis, besides a very

19

20 CHABLIS

perfect little Gothic church with votive horse-
shoes studding its door, there was one object
which worked its way deeper into my fancy.
It was a mysterious slab, apparently removed
from a grave, and set at present in one of the old
houses in a narrow blind street. I call the
slab mysterious, because, being visibly sepulchral,
one fails to understand why it should be where
it now is. Moreover, because the name, that of
a little boy fifteen months old, asge de xv
rnois (a cherub's head surmounts the whole),
has been effaced by what is plainly the shattering
blow of a bullet.

" Ici mourust ..." remains, and that asge
de XV mois, and the date 1569. But why that
baby's tombstone, cherub and all, should have
been clapped into a street- wall, and why, being
thus placed or displaced, it should have been
chosen, poor insignificant innocent, as a special
butt for Huguenot or Jacobin violence defies my
surmise. Neither was I able to elicit any in-
formation from my friends, nor indeed (such are
one's friends when bent on sight-seeing !) to
inspire them with the very faintest curiosity on
the subject. " It must have happened in the
wars of the Ligue — for you are aware (vous
n'ignorez pas, n'est-ce pas ?) that Chablis was
the scene of an important action between
Catholics and Protestants. ..." There are
moments when I enjoy nothing so much as not
having a historical mind. What do I care about
that battle or siege or whatever it was ? What

CHABLIS 21

I want to know is why the poor Httlc boy asg^. de
XV mois was dragged out (at least his tombstone)
into the pubhc street and there most cruelly shot
through the middle, his minute identity destroyed
by a villainous bullet.

It was perhaps a furtive hope of learning
something about him, or at least a momentary
distaste for historically minded friends, which
drove me into a book and newspaper shop to
look at postcards. The owner was of that lank
quixotic type with whom one naturally falls into
conversation ; and who speaks as if he had been
waiting years for a kindred spirit.

I glanced at his little set-out of faded paper-
bound volumes. Among the various almanacks
and detective novels and prayer-books, were
Tolstoi and Dostoievsky, and, odder still,
Stendhal. " What ! " I ventured to say, " there
are people in Chablis who read ' La Chartreuse
de Parme ! ' " He leant confidentially over his
counter : " Madame," he whispered, " there is
in Chablis only one person capable of under-
standing Stendhal, and it is he who speaks to
you ; " and added that what remained " de la
bonne bourgeoisie " in Chablis was obliged to
keep very quiet, because the place was given
over — and he looked mysteriously round the
shop before venturing upon his terrible indict-
ment— " to what one can call by only one name :
des parvenus.'''

That seemed so much more interesting, and a
deal more historical, than anything about the

22 CHABLIS

Wars of Religion. The Bonne Bourgeoisie
evidently kept very quiet, as he said, in those
mediaeval houses round the church ; theirs the
grass -grown yards and mysterious lanes, down
which the barrels of precious wine must have
been rolled over the cobbles. And the Parvenus,
the vintners of to-day, live in those roomier
houses, barely more modern, by the glassy river
and the bridges, and it is they who have the
gardens of autumn flowers, and the prize pear
trees, and oleanders in tubs, and even volieres,
where stout madame, in deshabille, ministers to
canaries and ringdoves under the towers and
turrets of the former walls.

Having crossed and recrossed the place in
every sense, always coming back to the same
spot unexpectedly (and this is surely what gives
such tiny places their intimate feeling), I waited
for my friends in the public promenade, where
once the citadel must have stood. It is more
than the mail inevitable in French provincial
tov/ns : a grove of limes planted regularly, with
water-meadows and long sloping vineyards
visible between their yellowing branches. I sat
there long, till the sunshine grazed the sedge and
willows by the stream. Some small boys had
taken possession of another bench, and, wrench-
ing its mouldering board out of the sockets, turned
the whole into a first-class see-saw, on which
they straddled by turns, munching their after-
noon tartines, and discoursing shrilly and pro-
fessionally of aeroplanes and aviation. Perhaps,

CHABLIS 28

after all, it was no Huguenot or Jacobin who
defaced the tomb of the now anonymous
sixteenth-century baby asg^ de xv mois, but
just such boys as these, between one iartine and
another, their energies not yet furnished with
public benches to turn into see-saws, their fancies
not yet taught to soar in space with Bleriot and
Paulhan.

So much for Chablis, dear little Vieille France
town, with vine-wreathed pointed houses, and
gardens like the stained-glass windows of this
country. How lovingly I already look back
upon thy poplared stream and the low vineyards
of precious wine on thy long coteaux ! And
what additional poetry will there henceforward
be in every festive forbidden sip of thy pale
greenish wine, fragrant of fresh-scythed grass and
sunburnt aftermath.

SOROR ^MULAQUE ROMAE

Soror jEmulaquc Romae. It was inscribed in
vast tessclated letters on the muddy floor of
the hotel de lille of Autun, where we sat waiting
for the concierge to have finished lunch and
vouchsafe us admission to the town museum.
And let me remind all fellow-travellers in France,
and perhaps in other countries, that it speaks
poorly for the attractions of a provincial town
when you are willing, let alone anxious, to get
inside its museum. Particularly to wait
patiently while the concierge trifles with his
food. On this occasion our patience meant that
the morning's exploration had led to the con-
elusion that the cattle market was about as
attractive as anything we were likely to find,
the cattle market being on hand in the square
at the bottom of the hotel de ville's flight of steps.
Sister and Rival of Rome, for it seems
Augustodunum, Metropolis of Gaul, had once
upon a time deserved that appellation. At
the present moment, as I have said, the cattle
market seemed the greatest attraction of this
deplorably dull and sluttish little place. Seen

from the top of those steps, from the tesselated

26

26 SOROR ^MULAQUE RO^IAE

floor with that " Soror Mmulaqae Romae," it
was a compact, vaguely moving mass of white
cattle and pigs, and dark blue blouses, sloping
upwards to a background of gaudy posters,
brown and slate roofs appearing above a straight
garland of clipped and faded lime trees ; and
above all that, against the watery sky, rose the
thorny spire of the cathedral, the cathedral's
Norman belfries, and a great vertical hillside of
dark and rusty scrub. An Italian looking
Jesuitic church formed the side- scene, ringing
midday from a wooden belfry, alongside of a
gaunt college, where, the guide-books tell us,
no less personages than Monsieur Napoleon de
Buonaparte and his three little brothers were
sent to mend their dreadful Corsican pronuncia-
tion. On the other side, close to us, a row of red
booths was sheltered by some dishevelled plane
trees. As the market thinned the stable litter
appeared among the remaining groups of unsold
cattle and chaffering blue and black blouses ;
while the place resounded with the massacre-
yells of recalcitrant pigs, dragged homewards by
the ear. Then the rest of the market became
visible, the stuffs and merceries under the
awnings, the fruit stalls and the spreads-out of
rusty iron and baskets, and new or wine- stained
cooper's wares ; second-hand things, many of
them, and telling the poverty of even these
well-to-do peasants, as the smear of manure and
the screams and lowings tell of their comradeship
with beasts. Pigeons flitted across. The fine

SOROR .EMULAQUE ROMAE 27

steeple, prickly like a blackthorn twig, and the
great russet and green hillside added the serene
dignity of art and of nature to this spectacle of
human and animal life. Decidedly, we both
thought simultaneously, it was worth coming
to Autun to see the cattle market. But de-
cidedly not, we each said to the other, decidedly
710^ for anything else ; more particularly not for
that cathedral we had come on purpose to see.

I had had to admit — all one knows about
architecture left no excuse— that the cathedral
of Autun, to see which we had travelled three
jolting hours in a slow train, was a monstrosity
and utterly contemptible. I had choked down
a contradictory impression, yes, an impression
of grandeur received on first entering ; and I
had spent the rest of yesterday's half-hour
following my fellow traveller's indignant criti-
cism round that church : constructive logic
nowhere, and that unspeakable replacing of the
Xorman vaulting-shaft by meagre fluted pilasters
looking as if tin-tacked under the arches and to
the carved romanesque capitals ! And to think
that this place was built but a few years after
Vezclay, with only a couple of days of walk
across the Morvan oakwoods separating it from
the mother, the queen, of round arched, media;val
churches ! I meekly agreed that it was shame-
ful, felt more and more depressed at having
come to Autun, and expatiated on the attrac-
tions of the cattle fair.

But a sneaking wish to see that cathedral

28 SOROR ^MULAQUE ROMAE

again caused me to get up early and steal out
alone to snatch a last hour of Autun before
leaving the whilom Roman metropolis for less
slatternly and disappointing places. It was as
I had thought. That first impression of the
church had not deceived me. And once alone
with that monstrous building I was free to
recognize — indeed, forced to recognize — that the
monster had something venerable and which
went to my heart. It may have been some
trick of proportion — a very lofty church, yet,
thanks to its lack of all projections, unusually
spacious. Or it may have been recollections of
Brunelleschi and Bramante making me un-
justifiably lenient to those fluted pilasters and
rows of quite unconstructive arches. Or it may
have been the watery green light of the stormy
day in combination with the silvery stone. Or
it may have been the magic of a snatched last
view. Be it as it may, this much is certain,
that the reprehensible, barbarous building meant
more for my fancy and my affections than
sundry irreproachable Gothic churches — let me
confess it, than the cathedral, for instance, of
Sens. For between that long first morning
ending in the market-place and this second (and
final) hurried visit to the cathedral, there had
intervened a melancholy evening expedition to
the two great antique archways in the valley ;
to the Roman theatre just showing its exquisite
curve (with evoked visions of Fiesole, Tusculum,
nay Delphi !) through the hill-side grass ; above

SOROR .EMULAQUE RO^UE 29

all, just as the sunset was already fading, to the
'J emple of Janus, a windowed cube of masonry,
stolen, you would say, from the Campagna and
set among the poplars of a Burgundian stream.
That had made me understand from what a
vast magnificent Roman city this poor little
French town had shrunken onto its hill ; and
in so far understand likewise the frame of mind
of the men who had perpetrated that architec-
tural atrocity of the cathedral. 'Ihcy were
twelfth-century Frenchmen, Burgundian stone-
masons, initiate into the rules of Norman build-
ing, impressed (the carved capitals prove it and
the great Byzantine Christ on the porch gable)
by the wonders of Vezelay and the other great
monasteries of Cluny which once surrounded
this district. But these builders of Autun were
under the spell of something greater than
Vezelay or Cluny ; the spell of Rome. Think
what that must have been : these words
" Sister and Rival to Rome," made real and at
the same time mysterious by the presence of
those half-buried walls fit to girdle six Autuns,
of the two huge gates stranded in the fields, and
that temple perhaps not yet stripped of its
marble coating. Ihink of the altars and idols
perpetually laid bare by the plough, the pennies
of Casars turned up in planting vines. How
these words must have sounded in men's souls,
repeated doubtless by chronicler after chronicler :
" Augustodunum soror a.'mulaquc Romae. . . .'"
Those mediicval masons were, it is true, copying

30 SOROR ^MULAQUE ROMAE

only Roman architecture, poor at the best, and
as it happened of the poorest period ; but they
were reahzing a wonderful dream, building " in
the manner of the Romans " ; and these people
who turned the nave of the great church into a
kind of Diocletian's palace rather than another
Abbey of V^zelay, were, after all, the first men
of the Renaissance, elder and forgotten brothers
of Palladio and Wren. For this secret reason,
perhaps, the monstrosity which they built
succeeded in touching me as something very
venerable.

However that may be, my snatched morning
walk, taken in order to see that church once
more, gave me Autun. For even Autun is worth
carrying away and keeping in your memory,
if only you can see it in some moment of intense
receptiveness, in the act of parting which so
often reveals all you are loth to part from.
I had three-quarters of an hour before the
departure of our train ; and having tarried part
of that time in the traduced cathedral, I rushed
up the ill-paved streets of the uppermost town,
a town I had not before seen nor suspected. It
was a quarter of fine old houses basely in-
habited, yet, for all present filth and avarice,
keeping a gallant and gracious air behind their
vines and fruit trees, and filling me with the
sadness of old French things, which is as different
from the sadness of old Italian or English or
German ones as one melancholy ditty is from
another : the sadness of the centuries of down-

SOROR .EMULAQUE ROMAE 31

fall and neglect of that great hidden central and
southern France \vhose very names are like the
scars of battles. And at the town's top, beyond
its pepper-pot towers and ramparts turned to
orchards, rose that great wall of dark oak woods
and russet beech scrub and upland meadows
under the rainy sky. I went watch in hand,
turning down or up one dusty road or steep
paved lane after the other, snatching view after
view, and then hurried down again towards the
cathedral. As I was passing it, I was met by
the cry and the little piped tune of an itinerant
glass-mender. The man carried as sign of his
trade a broken glass lamp-shade, and blew on
his flageolet as he went. The tune was that of
the Bon Roi Dagobert, who, as you remember,
" avait mis sa culottc a I'envers." But, in those
forsaken noble streets, that childish song of the
feckless France of old (admonished by so many
saints and sages to breech itself once for all
right side out !) became something delicately and
irresistibly sad.

VI

THE HOTEL-DIEU OF BEAUNE

The concierge of the Hotel-Dieu of Beaune, by
some disorder quite unaccountable in this well-
regulated country of France, just happened not
to be in his lodge alongside the Gothic porch.
But he would be back in an instant ; and, seeing
me hesitate about looking beyond the vaulted
vestibule, " Madame may perfectly cast a glance
meanwhile into the courtyard," said one of
several bloused workmen who were loitcrino-
about, with the gentleness of convalescence in
their voice and gesture. So I went in and
looked around. The immensely steep roof —
striped two exquisite greys of old slate— of the
outer hospital building encloses that yard to-
wards the street, with but a ground-floor of
buildings beneath its long slant. On the other
side are two storeys of stone cloisters, under a
high-pitched roof of shining yellow, black, and
green tiles, with pointed attics sticking up every-
where, and no end of little belfries and pinnacles,
each with its silver ornament, its lancehead
coming out of leaves, or its little saint or warrior,
like so many carvt-d housewives for the needles
of some gentle and dainty giant's daughter.

33 c

34 THE HOTEL-DIEU OF BEAUNE

At the windows were geraniums and such- like
flowers ; flowers also were stacked in the yard
corners, and more round the steps of a stone
cross, where a man was trimming the grass.
Through an archway one could see the spaliered
fruit-trees of a second yard, and, pushing in-
discretion a little further, the autumn flowers
of an old-fashioned garden. The whole place
had the many- coloured trimness of what one
looks into through the Virgin's bedroom window
in some Flemish picture, and the architec-
ture was of that domestic though flamboyant
Gothic of Van Eyck and Memling's heavenly
Jerusalem.

As I began by saying, the concierge of the
hospital was unaccountably away, and the con-
valescents bade me have patience till he should
return. But he did not. And, to say the truth,
I was glad at the moment, and (you will under-
stand why further on) still more afterwards. It
was delightful penetrating unnoticed ; the con-
valescents never looked at me, and the gardener
went on cutting the grass at the foot of that
cross, quite unheedful of my presence. I sat for
some time on the stone wall of the cloisters.
Near me, in a fine Louis XIV armchair, and
looking as if Moliere's Doctor Diafoirus ought
to be feeling her pulse, was a young convalescent
woman, languidly enjoying the yellow autumn
sunshine. Ihen I walked up and down the
cloister, attracted by an exquisite fragrance of
cooking apples. Smells are often poetical, and

THE HOTEL-DIEU OF BEAUNE 35

that one was poetry itself ; only the very finest
apples, handled in the daintiest manner and
seethed in the clearest water, could have emitted
a smell as sweet, as spicy, as flowery and amiable
as that. Only apples cooked in such a place
and by such beings as, continuing my discreet
promenade up and down, I could catch glimpses
of through the bevelled mullions of the cloister-
windows. It was a great kitchen, Gothic, but
airy. The sun streamed in on the opposite side,
turning the whitewashed walls almost the rose
colour of the great copper Batterie dc Cuisine
and the copj^er pitchers and ewers on the mantel
of the vast chimney. There were big flat
cooking-stoves with more rosy brass upon them ;
and there were long deal tables. And round one
of these, round something pale, honey-coloured
on tin platters, moved a group of women of the
fifteenth century : kirtle looped up over many-
pleated skirt and high white coif with hanging
veil, exactly like the women in the " Life '" and
the " Death '" of Mary. Only these were
altogether in white. It was from this table
that arose the inelTable fragrance of apple com-
pote. Or could it have been hot open apple
tart ? And those who were preparing it looked
for all the world like a bevy of fairy god-
mothers (but good ones, of course) cooking
the dinner which the little princess shall eat
when she wakes up from her hundred years'
slumber.
The concierge, meanwhile, had not returned.

36 THE HOTEL-DIEU OF BEAUNE

But that was nothing to me, well pleased to give
all the hospital arrases, the Van der Weyden
altar-piece, the old furniture, and whatever other
rarities Beaune might contain, for this half-
hour's silent intercourse with the Spirit of the
Place, whose breath that fragrance of stewed
apples almost seemed to be. But certain French
ladies, come to Beaune from a neighbouring
town in order to improve the minds of their
petites jeunes filles with the sight of historical
monuments (their loud allusions to Dukes of
Burgundy had been the only disturbance of
that place's peacefulness) — but certain French
ladies were of another way of thinking ; and
after sundry fumings with the gentle, indifferent
convalescents, their anxiety to see the curiosities
of the Hotel-Dieu before the three o'clock train
grew so unruly that they waylaid and apostro-
phised a nun who was crossing the yard, a nun
so old and bent, and so marvellously mediaeval in
her white habit, that I should no more have
ventured to address her than to request one
of the leaden saints to descend from off
those Gothic needlecase pinnacles and show
me over the hospital for the official fee of half a
franc.

I think that the nun must have appreciated
the modesty of my demeanour ; for she not
only allowed me to " jeter un coup d'ceil " in the
absence of the concierge, but, when the other
visitors had hurried off to their train, she very
graciously gave me alone a whole hour of her

THE HOTEL-DIEU OF BEAUNE 37

well-filled time. In the midst of this oddly
Flemish place (the architecture, the nuns' dress,
copied from Flanders, the Order or Society of
Bi^guines, imported from the Duke of Burgundy's
Teutonic dominions), she was emphatically
French, with the sociable grace, just spiced with
delicate aloofness, of elderly Frenchwomen.
" Ccla leur procurera quelque petite douceur '" —
she remarked on my venturing a little offering
for her sick folk — " et ils vous donneront une
petite pri^re " — the two things becoming, as
befits well-bred people, a little superfluity
gracefully exchanged.

The nun, or beguine (since such she was),
showed me all over this extraordinary Hotel-
Uieu, where every modern perfection of cleanli-
ness and precision (as in a very admirable
operating-room) has found its way without any
fussing into the great mediaeval whole. It
seems specially appropriate that the centuries,
and the revolution which have transported the
Dukes of Burgundy's tombs into a museum, and
hammered olT the heavenly hosts from the
portals of the chief Dijon church, should have
left this hospital untouched, with its furniture,
its tapestries and pictures, its emblazoned
coverlets, even to the pestles and mortars and
alembics of its j)harmacy. Appropriate, because
this hospital of Bcaunc, founded by a great
layman (Philip the Good's Chancellor), and not
Vjy a priest, is a complete examj)le of the joint
care for soul and for l)ody which only a slowly.

38 THE HOTEL-DIEU OF BEAUNE

harmoniously grown civilisation can achieve :
the sick folk, in their white- curtained oaken
beds, lying, under the gilded and storied vault-
ings, with their faces towards the great gold
retable of an altar stacked up with flowers.
Things of former ages. Yes ; but when shall
we be able to provide in our turn and in our way
for the soul's comfort as well as the body's ?
When shall we be able to give grace and fancy
to the pots and pans and coverlets of a hospital,
food and physic for the soul as well as the bodies
of its inmates ? Perhaps only when we shall
have come to recognize that, for all the rough-
and-ready usefulness of professional competition
and rivalry, there remains work to be done —
the highest work of all — tending the sick and
training the young, which requires a spiritual
vocation, and should constitute a kind of priest-
hood, even as it does with these white hSguines
(bound by promises, not vows) of the Hotel-Dieu
of Beaune.

The charm of my visit to this hospital was
added to by my recognition in the delightful
white Sister of something of the face and manner
of a dear old friend ; such might she have been,
such may she still become. This unexpected
finding of accidental likeness will sometimes
make us aware of our full love for some absent
one ; may bring us into more real contact with
our own affection and whatever begot it, than
does, alas ! a year long of the perfunctory
intercourse which becomes the routine of so

THE HOTEL-DIEU OF BEAUXE 39

much of our friendship ; the stranger, just
because a stranger, being able to give us, with a
sudden stab of recognition, the very essence of
our love of the absent old friend. I am glad
that to the charm of this particular place this
little innermost incident should thus have added
its sweetness.

As regards the rest of Beaune, I am at a loss
whether it is really as delightful as it struck me.
Perhaps no town ever was as delightful (and no
person either !) as almost any town may be
when it happens to show a willingness (so to
speak) to meet one's wishes half-way. Now all
through this fortnight of return to France I have
just been longing for a town which, in more
human way, should sum up the delicate kindli-
ness of the French country in this sunny autumn ;
the town, so to speak, of those glassy river-
reaches, those dewy, poplared meadows, and of
those gentle coteaux, where the apple trees are
beginning to shed their pink fruit upon the faded
vines and lilac aftermath ; of this country of
useful plants, of easy hills, of equable climate,
where autumn, with its vintage and apple
harvest, its fields of turban-likc pumpkins and
its hedges of blackberries and dusty delicious
travellers' joy, always seems the appropriate
season. Now Beaune has been this wished-for,
suitable town. It is on the flat, nothing rough
or difficult within sight ; its very bastions are
turned to vineyard, and its moat and walls
spaliered with fruit trees. It is as full of odd

40 THE HOTEL-DIEU OF BEAUNE

sudden corners, of unexpected slants of roofs
and projections of attics and turrets, as if
already in Switzerland. Indeed, it has, perhaps,
because Burgundy is, after all, a passage from
France to Teutonic countries, not merely
that French thing "Grace," but a begin-
ning of the untranslatable German quality
" Gemuthlichkeit."

That particular day Beaune was full of the
making of wine and all manner of vintner's
properties ; for is not its name that of a noble
Burgundy, and the names on the stations and
signposts those of world-renowned cms ? Round
the cathedral, among the little old houses which,
with their trees and discreet gardens, go in and
out with its transepts and apses and look up
into its belfries — in those cathedral purlieus
there was a rolling of barrels out of outhouses,
and the gutters of the tidy little town ran red
with rinsings of vats. The whole of Beaune
smelt of wine. But not of the heady, acrid
fumes which rise up in the porticos of Italian
towns and villas, making you think of the mystic
passion of Dionysos and the orgies of the dying
year. This was a delicate fragrance, a bouquet,
of wines such as warm the heart and quicken the
wits ; and of which a glass (I notice how soberly
these French folk use their wine) is taken almost
as a cordial. Wines fit for honourable hospitality
and family rejoicings ; wines fit for a " douceur,"
as the old nun said, for the poor sick working
folk, a restorative to the patient, hard-worked

THE HOTEL-DIEU OF BEAUNE 41

nuns themselves ; wines as fragrant (why should
Pomona be disdained by Bacchus ?) as that
never-to-be-forgotten apple compote in the
Hotel-Dieu kitchen.

VII
THE CHURCHES AT POITIERS

The (lav before vcsterdav my friends motored
me to Poitiers. As happens not unfrequently
in my roving experience, this town, while
filling me with aversion at the moment, has
already become attractive in my thoughts.
After England and after Germany, and several
years of absence from France, it smote me with
the familiar sense that France is already half
Southern and wholly Latin ; for Poitiers is,
alas ! Southern and Latin, with its dust and
dreariness, its unswept streets, leprous-shuttered
houses, and weed- and ordure-surrounded monu-
ments, its air of having done with life centuries
ago, and being given over to the creatures
haunting refuse-heaps and charnels. The for-
sakeness and self-abandonment of Poitiers are,
heaven knows, Italian ; but Italy has ever a
dignity and magnificence, the rags are, after all,
l)rocade and cloth of gold. 'Ihe French pro-
vincial towns of first or second order (for there
is a kind of small, sleepy prosperous townlet
which is wholly dilTerent — for instance, Chablis,
Bcaunc, or Montrcuil) are, with few exceptions,
simply so much dead and dismal prose. Poitiers

43

44 THE CHURCHES AT POITIERS

more so than almost any other I know. And out
of its dreary, dirty dulness rise stranded the
strange, inexplicable wrecks of a submerged
age of splendid adventure and romance ; the age
of Angevin counts and kings, of great crusading
troubadours.

Foremost among these strangely isolated
splendours is St. Hilaire-le-Grand. It is a vast
basilica, with great barrel-vaultings and octa-
gonal cupolas, infinitely harmonious, and with
something of St. Mark's in the fugue-like
complexity of its pillars and arches. But,
unlike St Mark's, it is very spacious, and filled
with the blond light of the fine, clean-cut
limestone of France ; a great, double stair-
case, sweeping with a sharp bend from chancel
into nave, giving it an unexpected quality of
romance. And the many chapels, clustered like
bubbles round the apse, prepare one from out-
side for its inner stateliness and serenity. St.
Hilaire-le-Grand stands, in a fringe, alas, of
weeds and filth, on what must be a jutting
bastion of the rock, the great natural fortress
whereon Poitiers is built. The other churches
are also at corners of that huge bluff of limestone,
draped round with ivy and clematis ; and about
them are odd, precipitous, paved paths and
blind, walled-in alleys, which are the things of
Poitiers my imagination clings to : echoing
empty lanes under the gargoyles and great
counterforts of the Gothic cathedral, little streets
of shops of objets de piete and devout books

THE CHURCHES AT POITIERS 45

abutting on a wide place set witli stunted
trees in front of Ste. Radegonde.

The porch of this great Angevin church is
Hterally defended by a crowd of huckster crones
in high white caps, noisily pressing scapulars,
lives of saints, and bundles of tapers on one. It
was a Sunday, and afternoon service going on.
The sudden sound of organ and chaunts made
this cluncli appeal to me more even than that
architecturally perfect St. Hilaire-le-Grand. A
church most human and historic, this Ste.
Radegonde, with something of a Shakespearian
history-play. Like the churches of Angers and
others built in France by the Plantagencts, it
has no aisles, and is of delicate Gothic on the
top of Norman, with ample windows foretelling
English perpendicular ; and, for all the purity
of its Gothic details, and the perfect French
shapeliness and proportion of its clustered shafts
and capitals, it has an indefinable quality of
England : built by English kings, St. Radegund's
initials on the great crowned coats of arm
obviously replacing the obliterated quarterings
of Plantagenct leopards facing those of the
lilies of France. A church, this Ste. Radegonde
of Poitiers, which haunts me with the charm of
Hewlett's " Richard Yca-and-Nay," of the
romantic world of Angevin kings and Froissart
chivalry, of an England still Continental and
half-Latin, like that of Chaucer ; a bit of
English history set down in the midst of what
is now that most definite modern France.

46 THE CHURCHES AT POITIERS

If Ste. Radegonde leaves such fancies, and
St. Hilaire-le-Grand suggests the Cosmopohtan
Byzantine world of the great monasteries,
similar from Friuli to Westphalia, of those
kings of Bayeux tapestry and Naumburg sculp-
tures, with their air of being but belated Roman
Porphyrogeniti ; the third important church
of Poitiers brings to me even stranger fancies. I
mean Ste. Marie-la-Grande, squatting or cowering
with its scale-covered towers, its sculpture-
fretted hide, like some evil beast of mediaeval
legend, some Proven9al horned invulnerable
Tarasque, in the midst of a market-place, southern
and slatternly, like that of Brive or Aries. For
this monster, monstrous in its disproportion and
its frightful emphasis of sculpture, in the
atrociousness of its Manichgean symbolism, is,
like the other monstrous sculptured churches
of the South of France (affirming thereby that
Poitiers already is the South) a half Italian
thing. Italian of an Italy which may be (I
know not which precisely) earlier or later or
contemporary, but which stands to this
romanesque South of France (Toulouse, Aries,
Brive, Moissac) as an almost Hellenic lucidity
of waking loveliness to the horror and abortion
of some bad dream, wherein all proportions are
distorted, and all suggestions turned hideous
and sinister ; the clear living reality of the
Cathedral of Pisa, the little churches of Pistoia,
of the Baptistery and San Miniato of Florence
dreamed into something odd and terrifying by

THE CHURCHES AT POITIERS 47

the France of Manichaean heresies, half-Oriental
Templars, and Albigcnsian wars ; the ruin of
the French South foretelling itself in those
ravening birds and beasts and charnel-house
cere-clothed saints of its facade-carvings,
creatures, all of them, fit to haunt battle-
fields and the unburied heaps of dead of sacked
and burning cities.

As I have said already, the impression of
Poitiers is an especially French one, this of a
stagnant, sordid, modern town, without activity
in the present or traditions of the past, living its
dull little life round one or two marvellous
monuments of ages having left no other traces
behind them. And it symbolises and explains
much of the evils of modern and half- modern
France. For what it means is the centralization
at work ever since Richelieu, the choking and
deviating of the country's life for the sole benefit
of Paris, and the loss of tradition, of vital
organization, in this sterilizing process. But
how could France have escaped such centralizing,
being already so unified, so centralized by nature
itself ? These days of motoring have brought
home to me as no railway journey could do how
one and indivisible this French country is ;
barely broken by the central mountains, region
melting into region, as the great sweeping lines
of plateaus and downs, of shallow parallel river-
troughs melt into one another from Picardy
to Aquitaine. You can travel from Calais to
Bayonne without elimljing more than such hill-

48 THE CHURCHES AT POITIERS

sides as the horses of a diligence could take by
the mere spring of their descent ; no winding
along precipices, no hiding in gorges ; the great
white roads run in their leagues of straightness.
The very valleys are but repetitions of one
another ; the villages and townlets — white-
wash and slate, mansardes and pepper-pot
turrets regardless of latitude or climate — lie
along the poplared rivers or athwart the fallow
cornfields in ever the same position ; cool grassy
valleys, just enough for the full, shallow rivers ;
dips in the road where goats browse among
fallen willow-leaves in the lush, dewy grass ;
high-lying billowy fields, with little trees,
pathetic and absurd in this vast sweep of land-
scape ; lilac aftermath on the stubble, bands of
yellow sunflowers, reddish vines level with the
stony slopes ; and above it all, above the
interminable straight white road, a pure southern
sky, fierce mid-day declining into the deep
russet of misty evenings. And everywhere the
scent, which the rushing motor seemed to cut
and drive before it like a vapour, of autumn
ripeness, of sun-baked woods steeped in the
first dews, of dusty clematis and roadside herbs
and aftermath tasting of caraway. France,
already Southern and Latin, but always one and
indivisible France.

VIII
ALBI

When the train had issued out of the last
tunnels of Auvcrgne. I became gradually aware,
in the declining light, that this country \vas the
South, or, rather, that the sky was ; the sky
pure, pale, pearly after sunset, with the scant
black tree-tops lying gently against it, and the
hills also, with lovely, and, if I may say so,
loving lines. It seemed quite natural to see,
passing by Figeac, a good sized cypress.

The moon had risen, summer-like, as we ap-
proached Albi, above vineyards, white Southern
houses among them in the moon-mist, and
presently, rising out of the plain, there was the
great hulk and high tower of the cathedral. This
Southern impression was continued for the ear.
It being Sunday, the population all seemed
walking about under the plane-trees of the
boulevard, far into the night. There were the
sonorous voices of the South, so dilTerent from
the ordinary French ones ; and real singing :
a young man's voice, very high, clear, de-
lightcfl with itself, actually singing runs and
flourishes.

I found that Southern town again, but found

40 D

50 ALBI

it with such a difference ! when I climbed the
next morning on to the cathedral roof. I thought
I was climbing into a tower, the noise of the
wind, increasing as I mounted the dark shaft ;
great gales hitting the building, and a sound
mingling with them which was mysterious in
that viewless place ; the noise, as I afterwards
understood, of a weir close below. Opening a
door, I found myself not at all in the belfry, but
on a balcony just above the cathedral roof,
and looking down on to it, or, rather, into it.
For the peculiarity of this strange fortress of a
church is that the roof is surrounded by walls,
turrets, and battlements, so that it becomes
something like the yard of a castle. Round the
jutting red brickwork of the cathedral's defences
rose the roofs of the town, rough, imbricated, of
magnificent copper-coloured tiles. Deep below
flowed the Tarn over its weir, a wide, muddy
river, Tiber-like, with balconied houses and
terraces and arches and gardens overhanging it ;
and, beyond the great red bridge and the
cupola'd convents of the suburbs, stretched a
country of rolling hills, with thin patches of
green among the sere. The South, doubtless, but
not the white, lovely South of last night's
indistinct vision.

Disappointment depressed me. I had no
further use for Albi. So, to cheat my impatience
till the moment of departure, I made believe to
myself that I wanted to see a Romanesque
church at Lescure, on the Tarn ; and, knowing

ALBl 51

full well that it was not the case, I set out on my
bicycle, with a hot. dry, southern wind against
me. The suburbs I traversed were of the leprous
modern Italian sort. The country towards the
dry-looking hills was dull, and not really more
interesting for the remark, conscientiously re-
peated to myself, that the cranes of the wells
reminded one of the Genoese Riviera, and the
pigeon-houses of the tombs along Roman high-
ways. At Lescure, a squalid little fortified
village, I found my way to the wrong church, not
Romanesque but early Gothic, with a sixteenth-
century Sicur de Lescure as its sole occupant ;
a little black, damp church, in a hole below the
village walls and gateway. It was surrounded by
orchards, fig-trees, bay-trees, and pomegranates
ripening on their leafless branches, all smelling of
summer drought and autumn sousings, a smell
only the South knows ! The little church itself
had the smell of incense and mouldiness which
is also Southern ; and the village reeked of
winc-lccs and opened cellars. There was a fete
patronale going on, garlands and lanterns, a fair
and band, and lots of neatly dressed, amiable
people about.

I recognized it all as Southern ; yet it had
nothing to do with my moonlight vision of
the night before, and / had no use for it. In dull
despair I continued my search for the right
church, the romanesque one, though knowing I
should not care a pin more about it than about
the wrong one. ,\n(l there it was at last, in some

52 ALBI

fields above the muddy river Tarn ; and, of
course, it was walled round by its churchyard,
and fast locked, and I could not get anyone to
open it. Pretending to myself that I was really
anxious to get a view of the pillared porch and
the eaves with their carved beamheads, I made
a feint of scrambling over stone-heaps and esca-
lading the gate. But in reality I did not care a
jot. This little church was certainly one of the
few relics of the great Albi of the early Middle-
Ages, which gave its name to the reforming sect
and the exterminating crusade that killed
Southern France for ever. But the great past
of Albi, like the boring present of Albi, was of no
consequence in my eyes ; again, I had no use
for any of it.

I sat down on a grass bank near the little
church of Lescure, and looked at the yellow river,
and the sirocco sky, wondering when it would be
time for return to the town, for dinner, for the
evening train, for departure from Albi. While
doing so I saw some peppermint, growing in the
grass within reach of my hand. I picked some.
And as the stems were broken and the leaves
and tiny lilac blossoms crushed, the well-known
scent suddenly filled my nostrils and heart,
making everything right, welcoming me to
the South, and connecting this dull distant little
corner of Languedoc with everything I care for
most in the world.

Bicycling back, the grace of things began to
touch me : the reddening tattered vines, the

ALBI 53

peach-trees and gourds, those Genoese-looking
well-cranes and classic Columbaria (with pigeons
frescoed on them, as in Italy), the charming
grouping of the dcep-eavcd brick farms, the smell
of herbs and wine-lees and dust and summer's
heat.

Nay, the cathedral, which had seemed merely
hideous and preposterous in the morning, began
to be vaguely attractive as it came once more
into sight, craning colossal over the roofs and
the bridges.

And thus it happened that, after having my
meal and packing my bag, I found myself
possessed by the imperious wish to have a last
look at Albi and its cathedral ; and began to
suspect that, recalcitrant though I had been, they
had both conquered me.

It was late in the afternoon, and, as I ran along
the rough back-street, tortuous, and of Southern
squalor, the sun reddened the high tops of the
dismantled houses and their roofs of imbricated
tiles, and. in their gaps, the great fortified pile
of the cathedral and its colossal tower, worn,
unicorn fashion, on its forehead. I went for a
moment into the cathedral, which now, in the
dusk, took a quality no longer of absurdity but
of sheer wonder, with its high narrow ceiling,
where prophets and sibyls loomed in blue and
gold constellations, and its immense flamboyant
jiibe, a fantastic stalactite grotto in the subter-
ranean darkness, broken by the glimmer of
tapers and altar-lamps, .\ftcr a minute or two

54 ALBI

in this strange, mad place, now hushed into
wonder, and a moment also looking up into the
huge lacelike porch and the fortified walls, I
rushed back down those sweeping stony lanes,
to the ogival bridge. For I felt I must see the
river Tarn again, even if I missed my train by
five minutes and spent another night at Albi.

The setting- sun smote the red houses and mills
and porticos and arches, red-tiled steps and alleys
descending to the river ; and above the red mass
of the town the other great red mass of the
cathedral : high loop-holed walls, turrets, and
battlements, and colossal horn-like belfry ; and
made them glow, burn, a marvellous fierce
tawny orange, with the muddy, reddish river
swirling round it all and over the weirs. This
was the South, I then understood, but not the
Italian South, which is my reality. Rather the
beginning of an unknown and imaginary Spain
that I shall, perhaps, never see, but always
henceforward dream of : a South with the mad
swagger of that cathedral fortress, and its odd,
savage look of an unavenged past, with the
fierce colour of the orange-brick and the tawny
river beneath the great red span of its bridges :
a tragic South flaring at sunset as if to tell of some
great burning of heretics.

IX

SENS AND THE NUN OF THE
BON PASTEUR

I FELT quite certain yesterday afternoon, while
I bruised my feet along the cruel pavement, and
then, after relieving them awhile in the dreary
sand of the Mail or promenade, rested at length
on a bench in front of the river Yonne, I felt
quite certain I should never have a word to
write about this town of Sens.

There was as much pride as disappointment
in the fact. A writer is always in danger of
degrading all life into a search for what is
technically called copy, or (I believe) even more
expressively, " stuff." So it was satisfactory
to make sure once more, even if I had made sure
quite often enough, that I cannot write when I
have not felt, and that I cannot feel because
I wish to write. Waste time and pennies on
Sens, well and good ; but not waste paper and
ink!

And yet, that very night I felt there was this
much to say about Sens, that I should look back
on it with regret, though why is more than I
could ever hope to tell. To call it a case of
revulsion of feeling will not do : a place having

65

56 SENS AND THE NUN

bored and depressed you is not a reason for
regretting it, else we should regret too many
places. (Yet, by the way, is there not a grain
of queer regret where one would least expect
it ?) Neither can the matter be explained by
the thought of " never seeing again," for there
is no reason why I should not see Sens every
year of my life, if I choose, nor any reason why
I should choose to see it.

The explanation of this Sentimental Traveller's
contradictory sentiments is, I think, humbler ;
indeed, humbling to one's fine spiritual pride ;
and it is this : it takes a lot of imaginative
pleasure to overlook bodily weariness, especiallj'^
that of feet bruised on cobbles made only for
wooden shoes or cloven hoofs, with the additional
over-striding of torrential street gutters ; and
this amount of imaginative pleasure the town
of Sens does not afford. But once that bodily
misery over, the mind is free to arrange scattered
significant details into meaningful masses, and,
moreover, to evoke lacking impressions from
memory of other places. It is certain that into
this foreseen regret for Sens there have mingled
images, even emotions, brought from elsewhere,
some of them so remote as the Main wharves of
Wiirzburg, the recollection and the particular feel-
ing of which united with the wide, yellow-green
stream of the Yonne, and with the scent of hay
in what was once the town moat of Sens, as I
sat on that bench under the elms of the Mail.
And scraps of other French provincial towns

OF THE BON PASTEUR 57

arose, and (for such things are mysteries !) added
a grace to the present whereof they had been
equally chary themselves in the past. 1 hen
there was the feeling of being in France, in the
French provinces, once more, with whatever
that vaguely stood for. Nay, Sens was getting
the benefit of those years of vague expectancy
about its town and its cathedral, even at the
very moment those expectations were being
dismally disappointed.

This disappointment is not, however, without
its interest, and, in so far, its pleasantness.
There returns to me in this town of Sens what
I have felt so often before in the French provinces
and has become more precise since greater
familiarity with small places in Germany and
Switzerland. I might put it in a negative form :
these French provincial towns do not, like those,
give you illusions about their present or
their past. Their little one-storeyed houses, not
without the grace of old fashion, with their
walled gardens and gutters rushing down in
front, may, indeed must, hold their fair share
of human virtue and tragedy and charm, since
no place is without such. Their reality is
probably no richer and no poorer than any other.
But the suggestion, let us say the illusion, they
awaken in the traveller is that of a mean little
life, what the French language means by vivoicr,
whose stingy comfort is unrelieved for our fancy
by the romantic terrors which hang about the
grim magnificent decay of Italy ; still less by

58 SENS AND THE NUN

that almost musical quality (as of a sonata
jangled on a table-pianoforte as we pass down
the street) of old-world towns of Germany and
Switzerland ; let alone the quality — Jane Austen
dashed with "Merry Wives of Windsor," of
little English places of the same calibre. Here
in the French provinces, as represented to me at
present by Sens, one feels a certain cossu
mediocrity, expressed in tidy doorsteps and a
most notable display of high-class eatables at
charcutier's or patissier''s, but not much for the
mind, no bookshops save for newspapers, prayer-
books, and grammars ; still less anything for the
imagination, like those rustic Wirthschafts where
Germans partake, among ruins and forest trees,
at once of food, of music, and romance.

In the midst of this close-fisted bourgeoisism
of Sens the cathedral (as is, after all, the case
with those greater ones of Rheims, Amiens, or
Bourges) is stranded like a huge looming riddle.
How did that vast, uplifting, harmonious, mystic
thing arise in — let alone out of — all this mean
little life of one-storeyed houses and paved lanes
overtopped by furtive convent trees ? And the
cathedral is utterly empty, as if they had
brought it there, after relentless scraping and
Viollet-le-Duc'ing, to show to strangers come in
motor-cars. This cathedral of Sens is empty,
not only of present worshippers — only a couple
of women at prayer in its white vastness — but of
all signs of former ones ; empty for heart and
fancy ; scoured and life-forsaken save where

OF THE BON PASTEUR 59

the immediate Present has posted up time-tables
of a cheap trip to Notre Dame de Lourdes, and
plaeed the inevitable plaster St. Anthony and
Joan of Arc. What has it all to do Avith Sens
and its expensive charcuteries and cheap hat
shops and the block-tin utilities and cretonne
futilities of d la Minagerc ?

One feels acutely at Sens, particularly after
coming out of that worse than desecrated
cathedral, that the religious life of France has
become furtive and mean, its churches (like this
one) having the status of " National Monu-
ments," boring museums, dreary " reconstitu-
tions " of the past, in streets dedicated, like
those of Sens, to heretical heroes such as Abelard
and Etienne Dolet. And one feels it sulking
and skulking in those carefully curtained houses
and in dank gardens behind walls : the great
Gothic tower looks, with its bell-shutters and
gargoyles, down on to a weedy overgrown
orchard, half-visible through the Louis XV
gratings of the Archbishop's palace.

But even of Sens, and of such furtiv'c French
piety, I carried away an impression which makes
them sweet in my mind, as the fingers of a
certain little nun, its heroine, had kept about
them the sweetness of the roses which she had
just plucked for the altar. I came upon her in
attempting to see St. Savinien, a very ancient
and neglected church at the end of a P'aubourg,
presided over by the C'hilTonier and the Knacker.
A nun of the lion Pasteur opened a gate with

60 SENS AND THE NUN

much bolt-pulling. The church, with an old,
old pointed belfry whose bells must have rusted
for ages behind their great stone shutters, stood
among grass and clipped hornbeam hedges ;
and its damp, bare nave smelt of the flowers
on the altars. " How strong it smells of roses ! "
I exclaimed, looking round, but I could see none
in those vases. The rather grubby little nun
laughed, with a kind of innocent roguishness.
" C'est mes doigts, Madame," she said. " I have
been picking some which were overblown, and
my fingers have kept the scent of them." And
trailing that scent of Persia and Bulbuls she
drew my attention to the blood-stains left in the
crypt by the martyrdom of St. Savinien.

" When one thinks," she remarked with pious
gusto, "that it all happened in the time of Our
Lord, and that ever since everybody has been
rubbing rosaries against the stone and kissing it,
one must really say ' que vraiment la Bon
Dieu a voulu conserver cela ' " — namely, those
gory soilings. What happened to St. Savinien
to have his head cut off, she then explained,
when he had come to Sens " qui etait alors
comme qui dirait Paris," to preach Christianity
to " ces messieurs."

These nuns have an asylum for girls whose
virtue needs safeguarding, and also for those
who have none left to safeguard. " You must
have difficulties — des ennuis — with them, ma
sceur," I suggested. " Oh, non, Madame " ; she
answered ; they dropped into their place, she

OF THE BON PASTEUR 61

said, and when they relapsed to their sinful
courses, they often return when they had
enough of them. " Et puis," she added, " il
y a le Bon Dieu.''

And really one felt there was, in that rude
little basiliea, its whitewash stained with damp,
and its floor eaten by lichen under the pews, but
with fresh flowers on the altars, and that smell of
damask roses hanging about the little nun's
chapped red hands ; there, among those nuns
and their foolish virgins, rather than in that
beautiful white, empty stone skeleton of a
cathedral, although the evening sun did flare
through its great picture-windows as through
a bed of tulips and anemones.

And my remembrance of Sens is sweetened
by that nun, as her own fingers by the damask
roses which she had picked.

X

BERNESE LOWLANDS

The hospital newly built on the skirts of the
village, where the big chalets and apple-trees
give way to the woods and pastures, sums up
many of my impressions of these shallow Swiss
valleys, remote from the feet of the tourist.
I cannot express the poetry of this little white
place, its shining pale-coloured rooms looking
out on the beech forests close by, and the
meadows, white with hemlock, across which, as
if to increase the sense of a closed-in peaceful
world, a solitary yellow diligence comes slowly
from the village lying brown against the distant
belt of firs.

In such a place one really forgets that illness
is painful, is wrong ; indeed, that illness is at
all ; one's thoughts (until one has seen the sad
arrangements, the boxes of shining knives and
scissors of the little dead men's room) running
on the peace beyond all telling, the rest in the
present, of convalescence. 1 his little hospital
sums up, as I have said, my impression of these
Bernese Jura valleys ; it and the fine old house,
containing the girls' householding school : an
impression of deep prosperity, of a harmony

63

64 BERNESE LOWLANDS

of past and present, and of work and leisure.
And it is all right there should be electric light
in the big cow stables by the eighteenth-century
fountain.

I was taken to supper yesterday at the house
of the lady who has principally given her village
that lovely hospital and that housewife's school,
and who has turned the old churchyard into a
very enchanting promenade. She is, I believe,
the widow of a rich Batavia merchant. Her
house is one of those beautiful eighteenth-
century chalets, with fine carved front door
(just raised above the street, with oleanders and
hydrangeas in tubs), fine roofed-over balconies,
and fine pale blue Louis XV stoves. It is
panelled and ceilinged with white, and holds
only the bare necessary of furniture : a sofa for
the honoured and abashed guest ; a big piano,
at which the daughter played Beethoven and
Brahms ; and a table where a very simple supper
was handed round by a young maid. The whole
thing a translation into modern terms of some
interior of Swiss merchants, painted by Holbein ;
and the Holbein faces, full of practical thought
and of piety, were there also.

After supper we went on to some other
members of the same family, in a still more
beautiful old chalet-shaped house, called Schei-
degg, from its original builder, who has left his
wife's coats-of-arms in the Grecian gable. This
house is not in the village, but on the high road,
hedged with neatly trimmed hornbeam, from

BERNESE LOWLANDS 65

Bern to Zurich. Like all the most beautiful
old chalets, it is a dwelling-house only in front,
where the great roof is tilted upwards in a bow
over the windows and covered balcony, while it
closes down with brooding wings over stable and
grange and byre, whence comes the scent of cows
and hay, and where hang scythes, rakes, harness,
and where is stacked the winter provision of
wood. But in front the house opens into a
pillared balcony, and there stretches the little old-
fashioned garden, bounded by hornbeam hedges
and palings set with urn-shaped posts. At the
garden's end, against the green meadow
powdered with white flowers and against the
round beech-woods, is a little Grecian garden-
house. " It was a good place to play with one's
dolls," remarked Tante Bertha, the white-haired
aunt who runs the farm, looking over that hedge
as into her distant childhood. The Scheidcgg
has a servants' hall, all panelled with oak, with a
great oak table and bench, two hundred years
old by its inscription ; and, on a clasp, the
splendid family Bible of the seventeenth century.
And over the table a neatly shaded electric
lamp ! This country is conservative and
patriarchal, while accepting all new useful
things.

The past of this country has been harsh
enough, like its winters. Walking round the
village, my hostess showed me the place where
the peasant-war of the seventeenth cen-
tury had ended in a massacre of the leaders of

66 BERNESE LOWLANDS

the country folk by the patricians of Bern and
Lucerne, to whom they had surrendered on
parole. From this my friend came to speak of
the Government of Bern of pre-Revolutionary
times, when the country was farmed out to the
cadets of Bern patricians, to squeeze and torture
at pleasure ; when the hay or corn was left to rot
until it should please the capricious Landvogt
to collect his share into the great tithe-barn
striped with the colours of the canton ; and
men were fined and imprisoned for not going
to hear the sermons of the patrician's creature,
the parson. Coming back from the exquisite
little hospital, in that village full of telephones
and electric light, that Swiss Ancien Regime
seemed unreachably distant. Yet my friend's
grandfather, whom she had known, had been
brought up a bailiff's son, in a Landvogt's castle
in the Emmenthal.

Every country has, so to speak, its own
interior, where its innermost characteristics are
hidden from the careless traveller ; and even
these unfrequented Bernese valleys have their
remoter Hinterland. Yesterday one of those
colossal, sleek Swiss horses carried us across
meadows and through forests to the high-lying
district called, from its one village, the Osch-
wand. Such high plateaus, existing only in low
and worn-down hills (we are here in the offshoots
of the Jura), have an astonishing charm of
remoteness and apartness, unknown to more
mountainous districts ; the rivers and the high

BERNESE LOWLANDS 67

roads leave them aside, the valleys and the
plains do not see them ; and their liorizon is
bounded by their own slopes, their world closed
in by their own belts of forest. One guesses at a
race apart, with its own traditions and customs,
self -sustaining and self-sufficing ; and such there
really seems to be in this Oschwand. They have
no doctor or parson, only a schoolmaster, whose
house is surrounded by five or six fine chalets,
with flowery gardens ; nor do they seek much
spiritual or bodily help in the valleys below,
possessing all they want, cattle, a little grain,
and even books, much read, out of which they
gather their own notions of history and poetry
and antique dignity. And if they ever went
to church, it must have been to Parson Jeremias
Gotthelf, who wrote his splendid peasant novels
in a parsonage only some miles away. After
half an hour in the Oschwand, one feels as if one
had lived for months there ; and returns to the
valleys below, through gorges filled with saw-
mills and along pellucid streams issuing from the
becchwoods, with the sense of having been very,
very far away.

It is certain that I had an extraordinary
feeling of friendliness and familiarity on finding
myself again in the valley village, with its pro-
cessions of cows under the electric light, and its
Brahms's variations played in the eighteenth-
century farmhouse. It is a good country, this,
of rich and well-educated people, who are still
peasants at bottom, a country modern yet

68 BERNESE LOWLANDS

ancient, and with so much rusticity in its
towns and civilization in its villages. And
perhaps the good Europe of the future will be
more like Switzerland than like our bigger,
busier countries.

XI
LAVATER'S HOUSE AT ZURICH

I TOOK a solitary walk yesterday in pelting rain,
through the old town of Zurich ; down the steep
little streets behind the cathedral, across the
bridge where old women sell cherries and nose-
gays under vast umbrellas ; and then up to the
Lindenhof, a former bastion now rising green
above the city, and wonderfully sweet with the
blossom of its formal limes. I had been duly
shown the country house on the hill where
Bodmer gave hospitality to Klopstock and
Wieland and Goethe and the Stollbergs what
time this little Swiss city was the true home of
the Teutonic Muse (such Graeco-German jumbles
would not have offended those worthies), freeing
herself from French perukes and furbelows and
the Three Unities. I had also had pointed out
to me, as fitted a lettered foreigner, another
house in a widening behind the cathedral, where
Goethe had been the guest, in his "" Werther "
days, of Parson Lavater, universally renowned
for lofty gentleness of soul (" schone Seelc "
they called it), and for science of physiognomy,
whereby Guileless Virtue learned to shun
Villainy's eyebrow and mistrust the Vulpine
snout of the False Friend.

70 LAVATER'S HOUSE AT ZURICH

And now, having walked all alone round that
Lindenhof bastion, and looked down into the little
orchards below it, and the rushing river, and (even
as Turner sketched them) the rain-blotted moun-
tains and lake, I sought again the purlieus of the
church of St. Peter, and the other residence of
Pastor Lavater, where he was killed by a stray
shot from a French revolutionary musket ; and
where, as my Swiss friends dutifully reminded
me, that same Goethe, returning twenty years
later to Zurich, walked up and down in the
street and turned on his heel, without entering,
while poor Lavater watched him behind a
shutter, and felt cut to the heart. For what
sufficient reasons Goethe committed this par-
ticular piece of brutality my antiquarian Zurich
friends entirely failed to satisfy me ; this much
only being intelligible, that Goethe had also
written an epigram calling his old friend a
scoundrel (" ein Schuft "), and that Lavater,
with his pious highmindedness and universally
translated book on Physiognomy, had come to
mean a " left-behind standpoint" ("ein iiber-
wundener Standpunkt ") ; getting over former
standpoints and the people who happened to
stand and point there, being, as we all know,
a form of godlike odiousness which Goethe
sometimes indulged in for better Olympian
attainment.

Be this as it may, I wandered under my
umbrella up and down the irregular hilly square,
where the comfortable eighteenth-century church

LAVATERS HOUSE AT ZURICH 71

and its genteel porches (for Zurich patricians in
sedans) stands under big trees on a terrace,
Lavater's tomb being in some unaccountable
manner clapped into its wall, just opposite the
parsonage Avhcre Goethe performed that unkind
parade up and down. And I thought over
'' left-bchind standpoints " in general, and those
of Goethe and sundry other folks' in particular.
And while thus moralizing in the summer rain,
found myself in front of a bookseller's window
at the lower end of that still and old-fashioned
and leafy square. In Lavater's times there
were no booksellers' windows, because, save for
groceries and baked ware, there were no shop-
windows at all ; books were exhibited on
tressels before the door in boxes, and piled — the
Lexicons and folios and Journal des Savans and
so forth — on the shop-floor, for learned men and
wits to sit upon, as they discussed the rival
merits of Racine and Shakespeare, the Three
Unities of the Drama, the Benevolence of
Nature, and the Corruption (vide Monsieur
Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva) of Society ; and
here, in Zurich, boasted not a little of all the
foreign worthies and grandees who came to visit
Pastor Lavatcr, and corresponded (princes,
grand-dukes, poets, and gushing ladies) through
years of elaborately crossed letters with the
illustrious discoverer of Human Physiognomy.
(And to think that Goethe, when he had passed
beyond that particular standpoint, declared in a
classic epigram that poor old Lavater's physiog-

72 LAVATER'S HOUSE AT ZURICH

nomy, if less of a liar than himself, was that of a
humbug and a scoundrel !)

Those were the bookshops of eighteenth-
century Zurich. In the window of this modern
bookseller, facing the dear old Peterskirche,
with its great trees, were spread out the latest
additions to German and European literature
and science. There were books on modern art
{Jugendstyl — what would Goethe have thought
of these slimy and vermicular patterns ?), on
modern diseases, modern vices, on Symbolists
and Decadents and Pragmatists and Modernists,
on the Mutation Theory of De Vries, on Physio-
logical Psychology, on Aeroplanes and Aviation ;
on " Blouses " — the book thereof — " Das Blusen-
buch." And, staring in at that bookseller's
window under my dripping umbrella, I thought
of Goethe, in his travelling-coat with many
collars and his hessian boots, walking up and
down under the parsonage windows (with poor
Lavater and his hurt feelings flattened behind
them), all because, having made his memorable
journey to Italy, and even, perhaps, to France,
the poet had passed beyond Lavater's " Stand-
point," marched godlike to new vistas. And it
occurred to me : Could but that riding-coated
hessian-booted Olympian ghost return this even-
ing, in the melancholy rain — return not for me
to see him, but for him to look, over my shoulder,
into the window of that modern bookshop. . . .

Inside that shop, meanwhile, there are dozens
of books and brochures, one more " docu-

LAVATER'S HOUSE AT ZURICH 73

niented '" than the other, recounting that silly
quarrel, that unkind demonstration before the
discarded friend's windows, which took place
a hundred and twenty or so years ago ; an
incident fit only to be forgotten with the year's
gossip, but grown immortal, acquiring the
emotional quality of the great lyric or drama,
claiming brotherhood with Faust and Werther,
and filling with poetry that rainy square as if,
instead of a poor trumpery anecdote, I had
heard some splendid music issuing from its
windows or chords of a great organ from the
silent church.

It was that most unreasonable emotion which
led me Ijack to-day to the Peterskirche, to
Lavatcr's parsonage, and that bookshop. I was
not mistaken, there is the Book of the Blouse,
Blusenbuch, in the window. Also a good deal
about das Weib, Woman, in biology, sociology,
neurology, criminology, and other ologies, still
unsuspected in Lavatcr's days. Moreover, what
would have perhaps surprised Lavater even
more — although he was killed by a stray French
bullet— an enormous amount of literature about
one Napoleon. Lavater was one of Goethe's
various " surmounted, or left-behind, stand-
points," as the German phrase is. Discarded
points of view ! ^Vily, any of these Zurich
school-children, looking as if butter would not
melt in their round mouths, will have discarded
more points of view by the time it is fifty than
Goethe did in all his eighty-three years. Nay,

74 LAVATER'S HOUSE AT ZURICH

one might almost say, than Mankind had done
between the disappearance of Hellas on the
Mediterranean and the reappearance (thanks to
Goethe's shifting of standpoints !) of Hellas in
the Grand Duchy of Sachsen- Weimar. What
manner of people will walk across — I won't say
this Peterskirche Square, for that will probably
be gone in a decade — but across any other
square of Zurich, after just such a lapse of time
as now separates us from Goethe's walk up and
down under Lavater's windows ? All the genius
of Goethe did not suffice to guess one of the great
changes which have made the world since his
time ; to foretell that those changes which he
did see would involve changes far greater.
Fancy, if any one had told Goethe, at the time
that Eckermann was his Boswell, that the inven-
tion of steam engines, of which he had heard in
mines and a few factories, would bring millions
of human beings into existence far more certainly
than if they had been manufactured wholesale
in Faust's laboratory. No, all the genius of
Goethe would never have foretold the change
in the pace at which change itself was going.
Indeed, I wonder whether, for all his genius,
Goethe could have conceived Change as such,
change in the world, as distinguished from
growth and decay of the individual man. For
his " Postillion Kronos " is but the driver of the
little postchaise of individual life. Or, at most,
the God of Time jehus a son instead of a father,
with topboots, perhaps, instead of shoes and

LAVATER'S HOUSE AT ZURICH 75

stockings, flowing romantic collar instead of
snufT-fleckcd jabot, hair a la Brutus instead of
peiTukc — nay, even with side-whiskers adding
to manly grace. But the allegoric chariot's
occupant is always a mere younger yourself re-
placing an older one. Change, for Goethe, is but
the Four Ages of Man as fabled by the ancients
and detailed by Shakespeare — playing and
hobbling about in the unchanged square by the
church porch. Imagine, on the other hand, if,
after that promenade at Lavater's, that unkind,
self-righteous walk, Goethe could have been led
by his own Mephistopheles to that bookshop,
and spent a magic hour in it, not, like his hero,
in the Past, but in the Future, with some smug
" Higher Daughter "' (" Ilohere Tochter "'), shop-
girl, let alone some Russian studentess, for a
Helen— imagine this, and what a different
" Postillion Kronos " Goethe would have written
or left unwritten ! Kronos, no longer Postillion,
but colossal, shadowy Chaufl'cur, or — shall we
say ? — Airship Pilot, rushing whole civilizations
in and out of existence ; nay, hurtling the
universe itself from chaos back to chaos. . . .

We hurtled moderns, meanwhile, linger in that
old-world square, cling to the anecdote of Goethe
and Lavater, that we may rest a moment in the
thought of those dear, narrow times when trees
were planted and houses built, and poems com-
posed, in leisure and for all eternity.

XII

THE AMAZON ON THE
FOUNTAIN

At Zurich, near that same church of St. Peter's,

at the crossing of two steep old-fashioned streets,

there stands a fountain ; and on it instead of a

nian-at-arms or some kirtled mediaeval virtue,

what but a copy of the Polyclcitan Amazon !

One arm bent over her head, one breast bare,

and her chiton belted-up like a man's, there she

stands, wounded or captive, on the stumpy

Corinthian pillar above the perennial spurt of

water and the stone trough shaped like the

hoUowed-out fir trunk which serves that purjoose

in an Alpine village. Rains and snows have

washed her to a leaden greyness, as if the stone

had turned into metal. The eighteenth-century

sculptor has placed a fireman's helmet by her

side, and also a dragoon's cuirass. And over

these alien accoutrements she stands sorrowing

between the high-pitched roofs and the turret

windows, above the fountain where, no doubt,

the Zurich maids, in stomachers and pigtails,

were wont to wash the salad and gossij) of poor

Gretchcn's mishap. Perhaps they wondered at

so odd and unblushing a female body (Weibs-

77

78 THE AMAZON ON THE FOUNTAIN

person) ; and at the taste of some High Herr
Master-Cutler or Provost of the Silk Weavers
having had her carved out of stone from an
engraving brought back from Rome, where the
Pope and Cardinals go about dressed like
the scarlet woman, and ride in glass coaches
with just such brazen hussies, no doubt, as
this.

Not a week had passed after my meeting
the exiled Amazon when I chanced into the
house of that selfsame eighteenth-century dilet-
tante. At least I do not think it could have
belonged to anyone else. It was in a place which
I shall not name, in order to save inquisitive
readers from going there and never finding it ;
and of which I need only say that it lies about
twenty miles west of Zurich. There had been a
late fall of snow on the Alps ; and in pelting icy
rain we stumped to the outskirts of the little
town, beyond where a knight armed cap-a-pie
sentinels from his fountain column a quincunx
of clipped plane trees. Then round the foot
of the castle hill, of whose towers and Diireresque
rocks and bushes one caught glimpses from under
soaked umbrellas ; past the gateposts and vases
of a Louis XV country house, and in at
the narrow passage of what looked like a
gabled farm, with great coalscuttle roof and
liveried shutters. Then, after groping about
in stone passages smelling of kitchen and
laundry, we suddenly entered a room : such a
room !

THE A>L\ZOX ON THE FOUNTAIN 79

It was remote from the rest of the house, and
indeed from the world of realities. The faint
green light of grassy orchards was filtered
through the old bottle windows. And in it
shone, unearthly white, the exquisite stucco
nudities of goddesses in medallions and cupids
dangling free from the ceiling. They smiled
upon shelves on shelves of eighteenth-century
books, in faded bindings of nosegay-coloured
papers. The Ilerr Doctor lit a faggot of fir
branches in the big French fireplace with u
helmeted Roman Emperor on its overmantel.
The room was filled for a moment with resinous
smoke, sweet like some sylvan incense, and the
flare struck those long-limbed goddesses and
dimpled love-gods overhead, turning their
previous pallor (Correggio-greenish from the
apple-trees and grass outside) into the divinest
rosy blush.

I was just going to ask about the Zurich town
councillor who had set up that Amazon above
the fountain (since it was evident that this must
have been his room) when the Herr Doctor, his
successor in that house, looked about him with
an air of embarrassment, and said, in that
Zurich German which has surely never changed
since the eighteenth century : " The ladies will
excuse if I now escort them back to their inn.
The fact is I have to attend a meeting of Church
Elders."

We rose. He snufTed out the flaming wood
against the firedogs, turning the goddesses and

80 THE AMAZON ON THE FOUNTAIN

cupids a ghostly white above the brown book-
shelves. And we opened our umbrellas and
went forth with him into the chill, rainy twilight
of that little mediaeval town.

XIII

THE HORSE AT LENZBURG

At Lenzburg, from my window at the old inn
Zur Krone (which, with the carved snake-ladies
sujiporting its caves and its splendid gilt sign,
niu:^t have been the halting-place of Goethe,
Byron, and Ruskin between Bern and Zurich) —
at Lenzburg from the Krone window I saw the
creature who will remain for me the embodiment
and symbol of what I love most in Switzerland.
He was a cart-horse, stately in crest, ample in
flanks and crupper, the golden-bay coat faintly
creased over the great thigh muscles ; a creature
fit to carry, in the deep scoop behind his withers,
the vast bolstered saddle, the huge weight of
iron, of some mediaeval knight ; but now har-
nessed to a market-cart and standing quiet, the
reins loose on his back, while a countrywoman
clambered in and out and arranged her load of
cherry-baskets.

Had he belonged to me, that horse should have
been named after his native canton, Aargau.
For, of all the Swiss Lowlands which I love, that
canton has the most adorable mixture of milk-
and-honey j)rosperity in the present with a
towered and bannered chivalry in the past.

HI K

82 THE HORSE AT LENZBURG

It is a country of grassy orchards (the cherry-
trees are full at this moment of pickers), which
beech and fir woods sweep with their solemn
skirts ; of little towns whose escutcheoned gates
and moats turned to rose-gardens enclose great
farm buildings, scenting the arcaded streets
with hay ; a country where there is neither
poverty nor idleness, and, as in that stately
eighteenth-century chalet which gave me such
gracious hospitality, the housewife will play you
Brahms after the dinner she has helped to cook.
And in the middle of Aargau is the meeting-place
of two great rivers — the Reuss, issuing from
Lake Lucerne, and the Aar, which drains the
Jungfrau range, proceeding in the united
majesty of their deep Alpine waters to swell —
indeed, to make — the Rhine. Above the wide,
brimful river-bed, islanded with willows, rise
rocky vineyards and steep orchards, each hill
with its great castle : Lenzburg, Wildegg,
Habsburg, towers and turrets and barns and
gables, which, for all their impregnable bravery,
have yet the sweetness of places where cows are
milked and apples packed in crates and children
taught to sing chorals.

At Lenzburg also, opposite my window at
that dear inn Zur Krone, there was a group of
houses which inspired my elderly and blase
heart with the fascinated curiosity which certain
houses and their inmates have in one's childhood.
They were against the castle hill, out of which
opened the various floors of the tallest among

THE HORSE AT LEXZBURG 83

them (all eighteenth-century, deep-eaved houses),
with its terraced garden and long flights of steps.
There was a shuttered, mysterious Garten-
Hauschen at the other end ; and, tucked away
behind a row of clipped lime-trees, another
eighteenth-century house, long and low, half-
seen only, and in its rear barns and farm build-
ings revealed less to the sight than by the smell
of hay and peaceful agitation of satisfied hens.
From where I sat I could watch the inhabitants
going up and down the stately open-air stair-
cases, appearing and disappearing, only legs
and skirts visible at moments under those low-
cut limes ; and when there was nobody coming
and going I looked at a big red rose, run wild
and hanging loose from one tier of the little
old garden to the other. I sat at the window
(the same I saw the horse from) and watched
those old-fashioned up-and-down houses as I
have probably never stared at any human
dwellings since my childhood : lingeringly and
longingly, aware that they hid a meaning only
for myself.

A meaning only for oneself. . . . This
thought has been haunting me of late. After
all, what is it that these old Swiss houses
and towns stand for ? Not really for their real
possible living inhabitants, much as I might
like them (for I love Swiss folk). Not any
romance of former days : I don't feel really
interested in Keller's Zurich stories, even that
delightful '' Landvogt of Greiffenstein " of his,

84 THE HORSE AT LENZBURG

entertaining in their sere and yellow all the
lady-loves for whom he had once sighed in vain.
Indeed, I do not people these places at all.
Their meaning is, I am inclined to believe, their
mere characteristic beauty, like that of music ;
with, added to it, as words are added to music,
the knowledge that they represent dignified,
simple living, without either luxury or squalor,
life humanely sweet and decent. But what stirs
me is the thing itself, the visible aspect and its
surroundings, speaking, like melodies and har-
monies, direct to my innermost, incommunicable
self. And it is this meaning, untranslatable into
words, which is the secret of the Genius of
Places.

XIV
STERZING AM BRENNER

When we got out at the foot of the Brenner in
the morning (having rushed across Italy a whole
sweltering July night), I experienced that peculiar
delight, as of the overheard phrase of a well-
loved song, which comes to me with the first
things of old-fashioned Germany. There were
the high-pitched roofs and absurdly painted
houses — they had life-size figures of Andreas
Ilofer and of the Minnesinger Oswald — the Speise
Saals, smelling of beer and of fir-garlands, the
ladder-wagons, and the well-tended flower-
gardens ; all the items of the mixed poetry and
prose of Teutonic countries ; of romance con-
scious and prized, no mere fluke, like the pic-
turesque grimness of the South.

Then came a day at Sterzing. How astonish-
ingly Germany is Germany ! Here, still on the
Italian slope of the Alps, is a little place which
has the same features and gives the same emotion
as, let me say, Goslar, hundreds of miles North,
at the foot of the Ilarz ; a town which is, so to
speak, a whole literature away from Verona and
Trent, through which its river rushes but a
few hours later.

85

86 STERZING AM BRENNER

A whole literature away from Italy. For there is
not a genuine old German town in which the story
of Faust and Gretchen might not have happened.
Indeed, I often think that if Goethe, in his day of
rationalistic pig-tails, was able to write that play,
and also " Goetz " and " Egmont," it was because
in Germany the Eighteenth Century took place,
so to speak, among the stage properties left by
the Middle Ages. And are not the towns where
Goethe spent his youth — Frankfurt, Strassburg,
Wetzlar — towns of the Middle Ages ?

Of such Faust-towns this little Tyrolese
Sterzing is the southernmost. And in its
straggling street of turret windows and step-
gables, Goethe caught his farewell glimpse of
Germany and the Middle Ages, of the Faust-
world, as his post-chaise rattled him along
towards Italy and Paganism, towards Iphigenia
and Helen and the " Roman Elegies." Winckel-
mann must have preceded him through that city
gate with its Imperial eagle ; also chapel-master
Leopold Mozart, taking his amazing little boy to
become a Bologna academician and a cavaliere ;
also, of course (with due lapidary record), Maria
Theresa and her sons, Joseph and Leopold, going
to reign at Milan and at Florence ; and later on
Heine and Mendelssohn must have changed horses
under one of those wrought-iron inn-signs,
swinging from great gilt eagle's beak or horn-
of-plenty, across the street of Sterzing. And
before postchaises and romantic poetry and
operas, the German Middle Ages, with their

STERZING AM BRENNER 87

merchants, and minnesingers, and landskneehts,
and monks (Martin Luther. Augustinian brother,
among them), must have halted after crossing
the Alps, at one of Sterzing's welcoming inns and
taverns. Those many inns and taverns, quite
out of all reason for the little town's size, turn
Sterzing itself into a hostelry ; only (and this
is what went to my brain from the very first
minute) it is the hostelry of the German fairy-
tale or ballad out of the Wnnderhoru. The
geographical position, which, unlike that of
Innsbruck, Bozen, or Trent, does not command
important cross-valleys, could not have made
Sterzing a place of barter, unloading or ware-
housing of goods. It must have been just the
foot of the pass, where people rested themselves
and their beasts before or after crossing the great
Alps ; where harness was mended, mules and
horses were shod ; and, in more recent times,
post-chaises turned into sledges. One under-
stands, seeing the great barns and stables,
baek-to-back with that single straggling street,
that all Sterzing has stood for is, as I said, an
inn. It has the cheerfulness, also the lack of
reserve, of the place where people are for ever
coming and going, or resting in the midst of
adventures.

The wayfarers were often Emperors. The
German C'a-sars must have stoj^ped here on the
way to coronation in Rome or to their Lombard
dominions. Not merely the pig-tailed ones of
whom we are told by inscription at the inn of the

88 STERZING AM BRENNER

Golden Griffin, nor even Charles V going to the
Fugger Castle above Trent, nor lantern-jawed
Maximilian, nor even Barbarossa going to raze
and sow salt over Milan, nor Frederick II
repairing to his Moorish Court in Sicily or
Apulia, nor even those Othos and Henrys carved
in Crusaders' mail and surcoat in the Choirs of
Naumburg and Bamberg. Not only, to my
mind, this Emperor or that, but the Emperor,
who is as legendary a creature as the heraldic
eagle spreading his tattered wings and jewelled
necklaces on City gateway and Rathhaus porch.
The Emperor, no matter who he was. Pintu-
ricchio painted him in the Library of Siena
Cathedral, in a framework of blue-and-gold con-
stellations and armorial bearings. He is clothed
in a tight-fitting coat of cloth of gold, which
reaches almost to his golden shoes with turn-up
toes ; the cloth of gold is stencilled in relief,
and the jewelled sword also, and the spurs.
His hair and beard are auburn, with threads of
gold, divided into plaited curls, like those of
Durer's portrait of himself. And in his hair he
wears a crown. He is the Emperor ; but also
the King of Hearts, on the playing-cards and off
them. He has journeyed along with his men-
at-arms and jesters and monkeys, and he has
suddenly met a King's Daughter, also in stencilled
cloth of gold and jewels in relief. He has leaped
oft' his broad-cruppered charger, and, running
to meet her, has grasped her hand. All that is
said to have taken place before the gates of

STERZING AM BRENNER 89

Siena, and the Pope married them then and there,
and a Httle wrought-iron pahn-trec shot up by
magic to commemorate the event. But it had
far better have happened at Sterzing, while the
fairy-tale Kaiser was taking his way south to
fetch his bride. Indeed, what could be more
likely than that she should have met him there,
quite unexpectedly, half-way at the foot of the
Alps ? And the little, meek Pope, with his
stencilled tiara and stencilled dalmatic, would
have been to hand, in one of the inns on the
side of the stage, ready to marry them oft' at
once, his bishops filing oft to the right and the
knights and ladies-in-waiting to the left.

But Sterzing must have been the resting-place
for humbler travellers also. Pilgrims to and fro
must have stopped there, often in sorry plight,
no doubt, half-frozen from the passes, or bringing
back fever from the treacherous Welschland.
It was for their benefit that the Teutonic Knights
founded a hospice, building it, on account of the
plague so common in those days, outside the
town gates, a good mile in the meadows of that
flat basin among the mountains.

We came upon it unexpectedly on a Sunday
morning walk across the fields : random gables
and high-pitched roofs, and green bulbed belfries
over long farmhouse walls. There was no porter
and no bell either, so wc pushed open the door
and entered. The hospital, or, rather, the
ramshackle old houses constituting it, is set
round its own kitchen-garden, among whose

90 STERZING AM BRENNER

spaliered apricots and currant-bushes there flows
a swift millstream of snow water. Not a soul was
to be seen except a poor pale woman, ill, and
perhaps half-witted, seated motionless in the
garden ; and the steps we heard coming down the
turret-stairs proved to be those of an immense
Alpine dog, like a heraldic lion in a tapestry,
who walked disdainfully past us. At last we saw
the caps of nuns coming and going behind the
geraniums of the upper windows ; and, taking
heart of grace, we went upstairs and into a
panelled corridor with the nun's kitchen open
at the end. One of the Sisters, Schwester Maria
Fulgentia, a dear, ugly, little woman, was kind
enough to show us over the place. It is now the
town hospital and almshouse ; and the successors
of the cosmopolitan pilgrims, the Romei of former
days, are poor Tyrolese peasants, some of them
wood-cutters and mowers injured by the fall
of trees and stones in the mountains. My
German friend talked to most of them, and gave
them wherewithal to buy cigars, for the good
Sisters allow the men to smoke even in their beds.
The place, indeed, was more humane than hy-
gienic, and smelt of anything but disinfectants ;
but its humanity was enchanting, and so different
from the chill dreariness of your modern hospital.
And surely, with its clean beds round the porce-
lain stoves, its coloured religious prints upon
the walls, and flowers at the window, above all
with the comfortable tobacco reek all over it,
it must have seemed, what not the finest hospital

STERZING AM BRENNER 91

can ever be, a kindly friendly haven of rest to
these poor people. At the end of a great
corridor sat two men smoking, dressed half in
their peasants' clothes, half in the hospital's
white smock and night-cap. They told us they
were cured, discharged, and going liome the next
day. And behind them, through the wide
window and over its nasturtiums, the bright green
meadows looked in, all white with hemlock and
shimmering with poplars, and the bluish slopes
of the great fir-clad mountains, like some allegory
of serene and sombre life.

But besides the sick and paupers, the old
" House of the Teutonic Order " has also a
discreet number of ecclesiastic boarders. And,
passing along a passage hung with rulTed and
corseleted Teutonic knights, we were allowed to
peep into the private room of a certain Geisilicher
Herr, who had a piano and could play, the Sisters
told us, seven instruments. . . . And the figure
of that clerical worthy, making multifarious
music to the sick Tyrolcse peasants, smoking
their pipes in the beds and passages of that
kindly hospital, melts oddly into that of the
Pinturicchio Kaiser getting married under the
sign of the Golden Griffm ; and becomes the
centre of the vague fairy-story impressions,
homely, romantic, and splendid and funny,
which I have carried away from Sterzing.

XV

A TYROLESE CRUCIFIX

" Dreikirciien " takes its name — if a place
which is only a name can be said to take it —
from three churches which a hermit built, once
upon a time, on this huge hillside above the
Eisack.

One accepts such a name and such a legend
without expecting to see anything corresponding
to them ; 1, at least, never thought there would
be three churches, or, indeed, three anything, in
this vague Alpine locality. But there they
were, close behind the inn, real, but like things
in a toy-box. or the knights and castles on a
chess-board : three tiny chapels, no bigger than a
shed for a goat, and inhnitely smaller than the
sheds where the cows are milked, clustered
together under a steep green slope, each with a
high-pitched roof and wooden steeple, wall to
wall ; indeed, as if they had been folded into
one another for packing into a box of child's
bricks. The door of the principal of the Three
Churches (it has long Gothic windows) stood ojjcn ;
and alongside, by a great elder-bush, is rudely
frescoed on the wall a St. Christopher, carrying
a minute Christ-child. The next was locked ; and

5(3

94 A TYROLESE CRUCIFIX

the third, its wooden shutter lacking a plank,
one could peer into through a grating — a tiny,
forsaken place, two ropes dangling in the middle,
painted and gilded wooden saints looming out of
its damp darkness.

One Sunday, I went not to Mass, for one dares
not intrude upon these peasants' devotions — but
to see the country-folk come out. Only the
women wore the costume. But all of them, men
and boys and women, had for my eyes, fresh
from the light-hearted comeliness of Italy, that
Teutonic look of sickness and suffering, of being
Nature's step-children, depressed and resigned,
which Holbein contrived to give even to the
full-blooded Englishmen and women of the
truculent Court of Henry VIII. So true it is
that the national type, I mean as artistically
embodied, of a country proceeds from its high
lands, even as do the rivers. These Tyrolese
peasants, living very scattered in these inclement
places, in cottages of mouldering wood among
manure-pools, whose women, I am told, strap
boards across their breasts to flatten out all
fleshy vanities— these Alpine folk, with the
silence of months of snow-isolation upon their
lips, are, after all, the figures which haunted
the imagination of the painters of fat mediaeval
cities in the plain, Niirnberg, and Wiirzburg,
and Augsburg.

The first time I saw the Three Little Churches
it was evening. The mournful St. Christopher
on the wall was just barely visible ; the church

A TYROLESE CRUCIFIX 95

door opened on to a damp invisible emptiness.
The cool air was full of the scent of the elder
flowers, and of the fresh-mown grass through
which rush the rills from high-lying forests. A
girl, at the inn, was singing some melancholy
German ditties to a quavering old piano. The
three little weather-beaten churches seemed
drawing themselves closer together in the thought
of the winter's snows and solitude. And the
little conical wooden belfries looked, with the
evening sky shining through their window-slits,
like the pricked-up, cowled heads of frightened
Kobolds. The place stabbed me with the stab
of poetry and a gruesome pathos, as of certain
German ballads and folk-tales where the heads-
man's axe makes a leap when poor young Annerl
enters, or the head of the dead horse Fallada
answers the little Princess from the city gate on
to which it has been nailed :

Ach Fallada da du hangcsl !
Ach Mdgdlein da du gangest !

And then, a few days later, I came upon the
Crucifix. It was an evening, going to the little
waterfall-pool on the way to the Ritnerhorn.
There is always for me, I scarcely know why, a
certain quality of romance in such a road ; a
rough paved track, a foresters' way through the
woods, with its worn, irregular stones, its look of
effort and even of sufTering, its reminder of dis-
tant purpose, of far-olV inhal>itants, contrasting
with the free, luxuriant life and death of trees and

96 A TYROLESE CRUCIFIX

ferns and mosses and the joyous energy of the
mountain streams. At the corner of such a
climbing track, where its irregular flags made a
sharp bend up a ravine, stands the Crucifix. It
stands under an overhanging blackened rock,
to which cling stunted Christmas-trees. The
great forest of firs and larches is all round, and
through it rushes a runnel of pure ice-cold water
in a trough of hollowed-out trunks, bubbling and
spurting gaily where it passes from one scooped,
moss-lined log to another. The Crucifix is in a
wooden tabernacle made of blackened boards,
placed gable-wise ; rough semblance of a house
which strikes one in these woods where buildings
are so rare. The figure has slipped a little, and
hangs forward, half out of the shrine, on its long
nails, in a helpless, hopeless fashion. It is very
rudely carved, but with infinite feeling in the
wasted limbs and sunken-in flanks and bowed
head ; it is the image not merely of the Saviour
lingering in half-death after the hours of agony,
but of Man crucified for ages in body and soul, the
Man of Sorrows and Acquainted with Grief. One
feels that such a work of art (for it is a work of
art) is the outcome of passionate impersonal
sentiment, that of the individual carver merely
bringing to a focus that of a whole people. He
has felt Christ's agony to be such because his
mother and grandmother have felt it so ; because
in every church, at every cross-roads, since his
earliest childhood, he had met images like this
one, expressing that inconsolable suffering.

A TYROLESE CRUCIFIX 97

And the elements have helped the sculptor,
weathering the painted wood into lividness,
shrinking the body and the pathetic crossed feet,
blackening the sockets of the eyes, and painting
out the trickles of blood with darker trickles as
of rust and soot. And the rains and winds have
also removed his nimbus, leaving only a stump of
it. and reducing the dead God into a perfect
image of despised and martyrized mankind. But,
on that stump of what was once the halo, I saw
fastened something soft and black, which
proved itself to be a long-withered rose.

Less than a mile from the bend of that paved
wood-cutter's track, where the Crucifix stands
in its gable-shaped tabernacle, the overhanging
cornice of the mountain has broken oil' in recent
times ; and the path crosses two great rivers of
rocks, like scenes out of Botticelli's Dante :
great, jagged cubes, piled loosely on each other,
as if still in the act of falling. They over-
whelmed and swept down a whole hamlet which
once lay, only a couple of byres now remaining
of it, in a green and sunny lap of the mountain,
with that runnel of water bubbling and dancing
through it in the hollowed tree-trunks. That
was some fifty years ago. Perhaps the Crucifix
witnessed it all.

XVI
WERTHER'S WETZLAR

I RATHER disliked Wetzlar while I was there, and
did so forctelHng (as oceasionally happens) and
almost fore-feeling that once my back turned,
I should love it. It and its hotel, which at the
moment rather gave me the grues, Ilerzogliches
Haus it was called, after some early nineteenth-
century duchess (could it have been of Hess ?),
who did the Flight of the Duchess (vide Browning)
from her Duke to AVetzlar, where she lived in
this house, which must have been old, creaky,
and creepy already then, refreshing its decrepi-
tude with Empire panellings and beds— mine,
one of them — with lions' claws and a classic
curve suggesting Calpurnia's dream. Two of
the four long windows of my room looked on
some stately houses dating from the days when
Wetzlar held the Holy Roman Empire's Court
of Chancery ; there was a great double-headed
Imperial eagle painted on a gabled house at the
corner. The other two windows looked on the
market booths and umbrellas, the pleasant
spread of fruit and flowers in the early hours.
And through my back, as I sat writing after

supper, I felt the watchful presence of the

99

100 WERTHER'S WETZLAR

Cathedral tower, more and more cypress-like as
it grew blacker and less substantial under the
full moon. And as soon as I had proceeded on
my journey, I became aware that during that
evening alone at Wetzlar, addressing picture -
postcards and letting my thoughts run idly on
Werther and his and Goethe's Charlotte, I must
have been quite unusually happy.

The houses of Wetzlar are not merely roofed,
but faced, in their tall gabled frontage, with slate
of a very light colour, which gives the little town,
seen huddled above the sedgy Lahn stream, a dim,
shadowy appearance, even in the brightest sun-
shine ; an air, not of the usual mediaeval German
jollity, but rather such as befits the shades of
delicate, sentimental suicides. And in the moon-
light, as I have already remarked, the tower of
the unfinished Cathedral, ending by daylight
in something like an Imperial crown of glittering
slate, takes the look of a looming cypress, a
huge sepulchral arbor vitae. It must look like
that on moon-nights from the windows of Lotte's
paternal house, with between them the card-
table and tea-urn, and the spinet which, you
remember, Werther tuned : the two windows
at the blunt angle made by that one-storied
house and its narrow, paved lanes. Wetzlar,
by the way, is full of flights of steps and of such
lanes between high orchard walls. One has
met such silent, turning alleys in old English
towns ; notably, Oxford, with the lime-blossoms
over-topping their blackness, and always, for

\yERTIIER'S WETZLAR 101

my part at least, with a feeling of something
foreign and romantical about them. And at
Wetzlar one seemed to understand why these
are the little lanes, walls overtopped by trees,
where lovers' departing steps would echo for so
long, listened for with loving ears and answering
pit-a-pat of loving heart.

One thinks of that, of course, while being
shown over the sitting-room of Charlotte
Buff's paternal house. All Wetzlar is, so to
speak, on a buzzing chord, a pedal, of Lotte,
Goethe and Werther. But what moved me
in the Loite-Honse was not merely that.
It was — I don't know how to express it — the
slightness and humbleness of it all ; of the little
old beam-house, the lodgings or lodge of a
steward, you would say ; and in it of that
particular room, with its narrowing harpsichord
shape, low ceiling, and uneven boards. One
realises the utter obscurity, smallness, homeli-
ness, out of which Goethe's romance spread its
undying wings over the world. Also one feels
that there was in that house something of the
exquisitcness of that book's style, the same
sparse distinction ; I should have wished to say,
had we not spoilt this charming eighteenth-
century word, the same gentility. They had
delicate and noble manners and feelings, those
people whom Goethe has shown us, small folk of
a tiny provincial town, for whom that immortal
young girl cut slices of bread-and-butter in
1772 or 1773. Their real letters, of which

LTRRARY

UNIVEHFITV OF r.M.TFORNTA

SAA'TA BAKiiAitA

102 WERTHER'S WETZLAR

Goethe's genius made such plentiful and (to
them !) disconcerting use, show it also ; and,
if we had not read those, the scanty bits of
furniture, that tea-urn, card-table, even the
mere tall French windows, looking down the
lane towards the Cathedral, would tell us that
those who moved among them were no thick-
skinned clod-hoppers.

After the LoUe-House — which is really the
lodge of the town residence of the Teutonic
Knights — it was evidently my duty to visit the
fountain described in " Werther " ; and on my
way thither, passing behind the little Cathedral,
I came upon a churchyard. It is disused, well-
nigh forsaken, and its blackened stones and
rusty crosses are overgrown by bushes and
grasses, the whole place given up no longer to the
grimness of human death, but to the kindliness
of plant-life, even if only of nettles. Here is
buried that young Doctor Jerusalem, the proto-
Wcrther ; but his grave, as befits a suicide's,
is unmarked. And here, of course, we must
imagine Werther himself buried ; no doubt
against the outer wall, after he was carried to
earth (in those last knell-like words of the
immortal book) " by journeymen, without a
priest."

I don't know by what rebellion against the
tyranny of Genius, such as lays hold of one in
towns thus given over to defunct glory, my
thought Avas not of poor copy-furnishing, real
Doctor Jerusalem, nor of divine Werther manu-

WERTHER'S WETZLAR 103

factured out of that dreary little reality ; nor
of radiant, aquiline young Phoebus-Goethe of
1775 ; but, very vividly, of this place doubtless
holding men and women who had loved as deeply
and sadly and radiantly as any of those three
literary demi-gods ; their lives, even if but for
an instant, flushed into poetry by passion.
Fleeting, forgotten passion of obscure, un-
romantic mankind ! But without it where would
be the Gocthcs and their Werthcrs ? For are
not these the strings, albeit often rusty and
jangling, without which Genius, with howsoever
a sweeping hand, cannot bring forth its music ?
I was in this frame of mind, my thoughts
further chastened by weary hours on those
uphill cobbles, where huge cart-horses strain
round-necked, when I sought refreshment in a
Fciti-Bdckerci, the merely luxurious Conditor
lacking, apparently, in Wetzlar, Besides, is not
Wetzlar symbolized for ever by Lotte distributing
not cakes, but bread and butter ?

They sold no liquid refreshment in this
])articular bakery, whose window-full of alien
tarts (awaiting their proper owners) had raised
my foolish hopes. But seeing my disappoint-
ment and obvious exhaustion (it was last
summer's fierce dog-days), the people very
kindly let me have some of their own coflee, which
was simmering perennially in classic German
fashion. As 1 sat partaking of tliis dreggy
but grateful beverage, I entered into talk with
the Finc-Bakcress knitting behind her counter.

104 WERTHER'S WETZLAR

She was fine in the German sense of the word,
herself, refined and with a shadow of melancholy
in her elderly good looks. Wetzlar, she told me,
was considered by strangers from all lands to be
highly romantisch. She returned to that word in
all her remarks, wearily and with a submissive
acquiescence, showing that, for her part, she had
no use for such a quality. Her tone made me feel
almost guilty in having found Wetzlar romantisch
myself ; indeed, having come to Wetzlar for
no purpose save finding it answer to that very
adjective. So I shyly suggested that there
seemed also to be a lot of new houses building,
all those nice little villas — nette Villen — near the
railway ; why, even close behind the Cathedral
there seemed to be one coming. . . . And such
is the sycophancy of sympathy that I caught
myself actually expatiating on the attractions
of those smug " homes for happy people," as
Ibsen's dreadful Master Builder calls them.
Nay, perhaps I half felt that they, and all they
stood for, might be the rare, the wonderful, the
thrilling, might possess the dream-stuff quality
we call romantic, for the fancy of those whose
lot happens to be cast in places such as Wetzlar.
But the Fine-Bakeress refused my proffered com-
fort and went on repeating, with that same sad
resignation, that foreigners from all parts did
seem to find Wetzlar very romantic. Such,
methought, is the depression induced in a
sensitive nature by the Wertherian moonlight
halo (the moonlight of the Sonata !), which,

WERTIIERS WETZLAR 105

refracted in hundreds of picture-postcards, guide-
books, and remembrance - cups - and - saucers,
seems to hang for ever, and even during July
noontide, over this Httle town.

It is odd, after all, I continued to myself,
stirring the grounds in my second cup of luke-
warm coffee ; it is odd, " odd, unnatural enough,"
as Mrs. Thralc said of the contraltos in the girls'
choruses at Venice, that the whole interest of a
town of some twenty-four thousand inhabitants,
should seem to concentrate in the little drama,
which was not even as it is described, of a
calf-loving, pig-tailed suicide of nearly a century
and a half ago, and the ten weeks' passion of
another lad of twenty-three, which did not
even end in a pistol-shot, but only in a certain
amount of ink, scratched with a quill upon
some paper. Very odd ! and if you let your
mind go round and round it (as when you fall
to wondering over the spelling of your own
name), odd, and quite unaccountable, that
the quill-scratching should have echoed all over
the globe ; indeed, that it still echoes and sets
our heart-strings vibrating to its tone.

XVII

THE GOOSEBERRY GARDEN
OF JENA

Jena will remain in my mind as a town of gardens.
I don't mean a town of flowers, for of course its
neighbour, Erfurt, is the capital of seedsmen (it
is visited, the waiter told me, only by " flower-
friends." although it is worth seeing for its
picturesque canals and ancient houses) ; and
all about \yeimar the old spaliered houses are
surrounded by standard roses, and on one side
of its market-place, just under the inn " Zum
Elephant," was a splendid show of carnations and
stocks all for a few pfennigs. But Jena, better
than flowers, has gardens ; indeed, the mere
sedgy banks of the Saale and its tributary give
it. like Oxford between Christ Church and
Magdalen, the look of lying in a park. And
having mentioned Oxford I may confess that
the thought of it, and also of that other ancient
tree-embosomed and water-encircled seat of
learning, Padua, enhanced my pleasure in Jena
with the sense of likeness and of dilTerence.

The first suggestion of Oxford had. however,
been of the drearif r sort, when we found our hotel
facing the new University b\iildings ; and even

107*

108 THE GOOSEBERRY GARDEN OF JENA

more while we drove through a dreadful Teutonic
equivalent of the Banbury and Woodstock
roads on the way to the Galgenberg. I have
mentioned that dismal excursion into semi-
detachment and Art Nouveau, in order to remark
upon the rapidity with which a locality can turn
a book into a classic, merely because the book
happens to people its solitude with familiar
human figures. For why did we seek out
the Galgenberg as the first Sehenswurdigkeit of
Jena, except for its having been the residence of
that imaginary Fraulein Schmidt from whom, a
year or two ago, the equally imaginary Mr.
Anstruther so fortunately escaped ?

That literary reminiscence having proved
insufficient to redeem the Galgenberg, particu-
larly in pelting rain, we had ourselves driven
through the real Jena, the little old town, which
was gay with flags and the red caps of students
emptying their last tankards before the vacation,
in front of various mediaeval cellars fit for Mephis-
topheles' tricks upon the Auerbach topers.
And then, the afternoon beginning to clear, we
had ourselves put down at the corner of the
Botanical Gardens.

There is something peculiarly attractive to me
in an old botanical garden. But, now I come
to think of it, have I ever seen any botanical
gardens which were not old ? Those of Oxford
and Padua, terraced and vase'd and statue'd,
each steeping in sluggish backwaters with willows,
occur to me ; and one at Coutance and one at

THE GOOSEBERRY GARDEN OF JENA 109

Dijon. They are all old ; and I have a notion that
modern botany docs ever>yi:hing in corrugated
iron sheds with electricity and Rontgen rays,
tickling unhappy plants into all manner of
topsy-turvydoms and frenzied locomotion. At
any rate the old botanical gardens, like this at
Jena, with their pagoda greenhouses and little
cemeteries of buried labelled plants, seem fitter
for Nathaniel Hawthorne's Rapaceini, the
botanist who brought up his daughter on
poisonous vegetables till she died of rashly
eating some innocent lettuce, than for Professor
Hacckel. Does Professor Haeckel ever take
his case under those cedars and among the
myrtle-tubs and little lotus-ponds where the
sparrows bathe ? I have my doubts ; he
probably lives, like Fraulein Schmidt, in an
Art-Nouvcau semi-detached residence, nebst
central Ilcizung, on the Galgenberg ; and he is not
sentimental.

But I can imagine some other Darwinian in
whom science should only have enlarged and
irradiated fancy, pacing up and down those
gardens sentinelled by the two mediaeval belfries
of Jena. He would be seeing visions, such as
Besnard has painted, of seething fiery galaxies
of suns ; of sea-bottoms upheaved with earliest
mosses and algsc steeping in shallow ripples,
and resounding with the distant roar of giant
saurians mating in the twilight ; visions of the
world of ice dissolving into lakes with pile-built
villages, where men first sharpened flints and

110 THE GOOSEBERRY GARDEN OF JENA

women first wove patterns out of grasses ; visions
also of terrible whirling universes of flagellating
devouring creatures in every drop of water or of
human lymph. Visions, also, growing ever and
anon into those of a pathetic venerable past :
mediaeval life in those old gabled houses, with
Gretchen's pillory -grating by the black church-
door, and the alchemist in the turret study ;
and then the boom of cannon, the crash of
cavalry through the valley, and, in the flare of
burning farms, the Rider of the Revelations, the
little bilious Caesar on his white Arab ; with,
at his heels, our whole modern times, hurtling
destruction-full. And then, maybe, some newer
era still, far away, yet to come, with science
using its engines no longer for war and grime,
but for peace in men's hearts and sweetness of
earth and sky and water. . . ,

Such visions he might have, the learned man
of my heart, as he walked up and down the
Botanical Garden of Jena, stopping perhaps to
pick and taste some humble pot-herb with a
high-sounding Latin name, or some evergreen,
whose bitter resin brings sudden thoughts of
white temples on Ionian cliffs. Such visions
would he have had (and worded in immortal
strophes), the Wise Man of my fancy, Goethe,
born afresh a century later. For, among my
many absurd regrets, one of the most recurrent
is that Goethe should not have lived to know
modern science, and more particularly its
Darwinian developments. Or rather — would it

THE GOOSEBERRY GARDEN OF JENA 111

have been ? the chemistry of the last twenty-
years. Or, of course, the great modern study of
past civiHzations and creeds ; our nascent
science of body and soul ; all that our poets
have at their hand, but do not feel as he would
have felt it !

And mentioning the name of Goethe leads me
to the many names, mere labels without dates
or further commentary, which are dotted about
on the steep-roofed houses near the old University
buildings : Schiller, Herder, Tieck, Fichte,
Hegel. Here they boarded, no doubt, while
learning or teaching at Jena, between the
ogived beer-cellar and the Botanical Garden —
those who made Germany revered and beloved
above all nations, giving the world Coleridge,
Byron, Scott, Carlyle, Hugo, and Renan, before
the hill above Jena was crowned by a Bismarck
Tower, in form half Theodoric's tomb and half
money-box, and symbolizing in that grim and
foolish shape so many silly shams and ugly
realities which modern men prefer to Gothic
belfries and gabled universities, and peaceful
botanical gardens with lotus-ponds and old, old
tulip-trees.

But the Botanical Garden, although it has made
me wax a trifle eloquent, is not the garden to
which my heart is really lost at Jena. No, nor
is it even the " Garden of the Princesses " —
Princessinen Garten, where the future Empress
Augusta and her sister were wooed — little
princesses in short waisted muslin and poke

112 THE GOOSEBERRY GARDEN OF JENA

bonnets and sandalled " brodequins," by Royal
suitors, no doubt in Hessians and frogged coats,
fresh from triumphant entry into Paris ; alas,
alas ! to enter it again fifty years later as grey-
bearded conquerors.

The garden which really took my heart and
fancy at Jena was a Gooseberry Garden. It
is on the outskirts of the old town, along the
river Saale, and touches that kind of " Mesopo-
tamia " of water and willows and grass which is
fitly known as Paradies. There is no show of it
from the road ; only a delightful deep-eaved,
old-fashioned house, with ropes of creepers
garlanding it like a classic altar ; also a most
engaging eighteenth-century gate. On the door
thereof stood the name of a market-gardener.
So, cloaking our inquisitiveness in a wish for the
seeds of certain pure rose-coloured snapdragons,
we rang a bell, which nobody answered, and we
entered. It was a garden, a large square garden,
with Louis XV tool-houses and tubs of very old
myrtle-trees. A garden perfectly symmetrical,
tire au cordon, like a tiny Versailles, with gallant
allegorical ladies at intervals along the hedges :
"I'Europe," "I'Asie," " I'Am^rique," &c., with
attributes to eke out their scant draperies ; and
in a miniature rond-point, silhouetted most
funnily against the dark Thuringian fir forest, a
distracted warrior evidently singing the gavotte
of Gluck's " Armide."

So far, so good. * One has seen such Versailles
in duodecimo in Germanv. But what one has

THE GOOSEBERRY GARDEN OF JENA 113

not seen or dreamed of (even in fruit-fullest
childish dreams) is that such a garden should
be made not of hornbeam or box or yew, but of
gooseberry bushes. Yet of gooseberry bushes
was made that garden at Jena ! Gooseberry
bushes trained into standards, gooseberry bushes
clipped into pyramids and parasols and balls,
gooseberry bushes drawn out into long vine-like
festoons ; bushes laden with gooseberries the
colour of plums, of grapes, of cherries, of figs ;
gooseberries hairy and smooth ; gooseberries
like nectar and ambrosia. Among which keep
watch, against the background of fir-clad hillside,
those eighteenth-century statues of the quarters
of the globe and the seasons of the year.

That is the finest garden in Jena. And the
sweetest, in every sense of that word, not only in
Jena, but, to my thinking, in any other place
whatsoever.

XVIII
THE VICTOR OF XANTEN

To me Xantcn meant two couplets of the

" Nibelungcnlicd." and the birthplaee and

kingdom of Siegfried : a vague, mythological

city, where the widened Rhine, deltaing into the

sea. would suck in with the tide or spread

throughout all northern regions with the ebb,

the story, shifting and changing like the sea and

the sandbanks, of the Volsung Dragon-Slayer.

And, at the same time, a place invested with

some sort of Greek quality by reason of its X ;

for is not Xanthos a chief town of the Lycians,

a river in the Troad also (" which Men called

Scamander but the Gods called Xanthus "),

and, moreover, the name of one of the Coursers

of Achilles ?

Our first sight of the real Xanten — for there is

one — was from the wharf at Wesel ; not the

timbered and towered Wesel among the vineyards

of the upper river, but the fortress holding, with

its green escarpments, the bridge of boats across

the lower Rhine. It was near the close of a cold

and stormy day. Soldiers were hurrying across

the bridge towards the garrison town, and the

pontoon puITed to and fro for the passage of the

1 15

116 THE VICTOR OF XANTEN

day's last barges, lip to lip with the grey water
which flowed over their bright-green gunwhale,
with the thick plume of the steam-tug's smoke
in front and the rowing-boats leaping like
dolphins in the foam at the stern. A wet and
wintry wind blew in gusts, curdling the wide,
livid river ; and showers came and went with the
great loose clouds. There had been no visible
sunset, only a faint redness revealing it across
the low-lying water-meadows and the distant
belts of forest. And against this sanguine
streak, at the end of that wide expanse swept
round by the mighty river, rose two black pointed
towers. That was Xanten.

We went to Xanten the next morning. It was
still stormy, the Rhine lashed backwards by the
north-west wind, and looking almost like an arm
of the sea. During the hour's steam down from
Wesel Wharf to Xanten the little boat was flush
with the water ; and the banks, with here and
there a few grey cottages and scant trees, and
cows in the grass, were flush with it also ; every-
thing flat— near, far ; only the heaped-up clouds
playing at mountains. The little steamer set
down its half-dozen passengers — market-women,
with baskets neatly covered with rose-coloured
cotton — at various landing-stages, with no signs
of habitation save an occasional windmill, and
finally set us also down at the edge of a field, the
beginning of a long Hobbema'ish avenue, with
the twin towers of Xanten far away across
meadows. And to Xanten we walked along

THE VICTOR OF XAXTEX 117

dykes and fields, smelling bitter- sweet and
autumnal with pulled-up potatoes.

Except for the great gate-towers, nothing
remains of Xanten's walls but their shape : the
little town, like a sleepy animal when you untie
its tether, has not stirred from within their
cireuit. It is not mediaeval, like so many small
German towns, nor eighteenth-century, like
so many more ; it is not even old-fashioned in
any definite manner ; it is just old, old, too old
for one to think of when it was anything else.
In a way it scarcely exists at all, shrunken to
the mere precincts of its cathedral.

Xanten, one sees at the first glance, is a
priestly town, with that something furtive, dead-
alive, almost shamming death, one might say,
of ecclesiastical centres, like Angers or Regens-
burg. There is a false modesty about it, as of
the curtained windows of the canons' houses
in the close and of the screen of rusty elms
clipped to their height. The cathedral, with its
two great Xorman spire-capped towers, its grim,
colossal Calvary (a bogy perched on the cross
of the Impenitent Thief), and its Chimin de la
Croix of blackened stone, is the one thing which
asserts, which dominates, and that most gloomily
and imperiously. It has drawn everything into
itself, and its inside is quite extraordinarily full
of things and of suggestions. There is a splendid
carved and gilded rctahlo against every pillar ;
intricate, inextricable inventions of thorns,
untlcrs, saints, grotesques, and histories, story

118 THE VICTOR OF XANTEN

on story and wing on wing, each with its shutters
painted in close-packed, vivid patches of colour
and gold, landscape on landscape, figure on figure,
veil upon cloak, cloak upon robe, fur on velvet,
velvet on brocade, and pattern on pattern on the
brocade itself ; gold pomegranate on stencilled
gold lilies, embroidered heraldry on fields of
flowers ; and gold chains and jewels everywhere,
as if were you to paint till Doomsday you could
never paint things half precious enough for
oblation. The choir-stalls are carved above,
below, under the seats, atop of them. There
is a roodscreen and another roodscreen ; a
candelabrum and yet another : antlers, thorns
interlaced, with innumerable figures poised on
them. And above the carvings are exquisite
lilac and pale-rose arrases, beautiful knights and
ladies with jewelled and embroidered dresses
and armour, among closely packed columbines,
and strawberries, and martagon lilies, and every
other flower ; and more tapestry, with even
tighter-packed flowers on dark blue, half-hidden
behind the high altar. Also, of course, statue on
statue, wood, stone, painted, gilded. And every-
where inscriptions and scroll-work repeating the
same words dozens of times over. But above
all this wealth and profusion, and explaining it
all, there is wealth, profusion inconceivable of
Bones. For all round the great choir, above the
carving and panelling and the tapestries, runs
a continuous cornice of blue-and-gold boxes,
displaying through their glass sides close-packed

THE VICTOR OF XANTEN 119

parcels and stacks of Bones : tibias, ribs, thigh-
bones, hip-bones, collar-bones, backbones, skulls,
all according to their kind, and each and all
wrapped in brocade, tied with gold lace, and
covered with pearls so shamelessly big that it
never occurs for a moment that any of them may
be real ones. And when all these boxes had been
packed full of such bones, and the boxes crowded
side by side along that choir-cornice. Bones,
Relics, still remained over (like the less grisly
basketfuls of the Apostles), boxfuls, which have
had to be set about, all with their glass, their
silk and gold lace and Roman pearls, in various
other parts of Xanten Cathedral. And all round
the choir, and in many other places, the informa-
tion is perpetually being blazoned out in gold
letters on a blue ground that these are the Bones
of Three Hundred and Thirty Martyrs collected
e locis palustribus by Helena, Mother of Constan-
tine Imperator. It is in their honour, in honour
especially of their captain, St. Victor, that all
this wealth has accumulated throughout the
centuries in this great church.

In the church, and even more in the sacristy.
After fruitless attempts to bribe a sacristan, who
moved his eyes but never his head, after the
manner of the Commander in " Don Giovanni,"
we were shown the treasure of Xanten by one of
the canons in person. There were safes crammed
with reliquaries, each covered with close-packed
ivory carvings, or immense round gems, or
antique cameos, or Byzantine enamels ; and a

120 THE VICTOR OF XANTEN

great wardrobe, where the most magnificent
cloth-of-gold and brocade and embroidered
vestments hung — with all the colours of autumn
flowers and leaves, hung so close that you
ruffled the splendour of the one in pulling out the
other. But somehow the riches of this church
are not merely material : it is full of marks of age,
stains, worn-down stones, trodden-out inscrip-
tions, carvings fingered almost to shapelessness —
full of everything which disembodies itself into
vague memories and indefinable sense of sanctity,
an atmosphere like that of the withering flowers
stacked on the altars, of stale incense, and, so
to speak, of bygone generations. The whole
cathedral is full of an imaginative colour, like
that of those lovely arrases in its choir, faded
and frayed into mere silver and pale rose and
cinnamon and lavender, with their ghosts of
Kings and Queens.

Now, all this wealth of things and of suggestions
has collected, accreted, round those horrid
beribboned, bejewelled bones of Three Hundred
and Thirty nameless broken-up skeletons ! The
thought, I must confess, was at first rather
revolting, coming, as it did, after a visit to Koln
and her Eleven Thousand Virgins ; this great
navigable Rhein made freight, it seems, a matter
of no consideration, so that the devout could lay
in stores of relics, not, as in inland cities, by the
box- or reliquary-ful, but measured by the
capacity of lighters and of barges !

I bought a sixpenny guidebook in order to get

THE VICTOR OF XANTEN 121

right those couplets of the " Nibelungcnlied "
whicli were unclutchably haunting me ; here,
moreover, they are, lest you should confuse the
middle-high German Iliad with Richard Wagner's
epic stage accessories :

Do wuosz in Niderlandcn ein edeln kiineges hint,
Des vater der hiesz Sigemunt, sin muoter Sigelint,
In einer richen biirge iviten zvohl bckant
Nideme bi dem Rine : din tvas ze Xanien gcnanf.

Well, from this illustrated guide to the seeworthi'
nesses of the town and cathedral of Xanten, I
learned, of course, a great number of facts
altogether uninteresting to me, but two which
set me deeply pondering. This place, having
been the winter encampment of a Roman
legion, was called the Colony of Trajan,
T raj ana, which, owing to the mediaeval passion
for Pius iEneas and all his concerns, became
transformed in time into Colonia Trojana,
and for brevity, into Troja, Troy itself. But
then came the bones of the Three Hundred and
Thirty martyrs, and the new name Xanten, from
Sanctos. Ad Sanctos, zu Sankten, or Xanten ;
you came to see and venerate these Bones,
Tibias, Skulls, Hip Bones, Ribs, Femurs, all the
osseous fragments of those Three Hundred and
Thirty Nameless Ones for whom no individuality
could be discovered and no name be required —
just Saints ; Saints by the boxful, venerated and
invoked without any need for knowing which
was which — indeed, wliieh Ijclonged to one

122 THE VICTOR OF XANTEN

another and made up a skeleton ; Saints, just
Saints, with no other attribute or distinction :
that great cathedral being a mere collective shrine,
in fact a common ossuary.

But above all this anonymous and, so to speak,
joint-stock saintliness of Sancten, or Xanten,
there stands out (the only name and effigy, but
constantly repeated) one Saint, to whom the
church, the town, are dedicated : Saint Victor ;
a knightly youth, sometimes in Roman boots
and cuirass and tags, sometimes in heavy
Renaissance plate armour, such as Gotz von
Berlichingen and Kaiser Maximilian wore ;
sometimes in supple Crusader's mail under the
long, loosely girdled smock ; once, indeed twice
(and of this more anon), in such scales from head
to foot as to make the erect warrior the counter-
part of the dragon he is transpiercing. Victor
— that is what the Church calls him. But Victor
is not a name, it is a title. And who should
this victorious warrior be, this beardless knight
of whom that church, that town (once sig-
nificantly called Troy) of Xanten, are the shrine.
This hero, so well known that his name need
not be mentioned^ because he is the champion,
the victor — who should he be except Siegfried ?
One understands it at once, and as if one had
expected it all along, when one sees, one after
the other, all those effigies of the knight to whom
the cathedral is dedicated, the young knight
whom each century has accoutred in its own
armour, the victor cruelly cut off in his flower.

THE VICTOR OF XANTEN 123

murdered, martyred, as these priestly bodies
call it, by wicked men. " And there, of course,"
I exclaimed as we passed through the gateway to
the cathedral close and looked up at the mailed
and vizored dragon-slayer carved upon cither
side of its arch — " there, of course, is Siegfried."

It is no use talking about Roman legionaries
and their centurion put to death by Diocletian
in that place for disrespect to the official
religion. We know the real reason of it all ; the
Edda and the Xibelungenlied, let alone Wagner,
have told us often enough. He was slain, that
young hero of Xanten, not on account of
Christianity, but because of the love and the
vengeance of Brunhilt, of the gold still lying in the
Rhine near Bingen, of the sins of the gods and
the destiny of heroes. And we can surely guess,
remembering those great wedding slaughters
to which Volker the Minstrel sang and fiddled,
remembering the captives sent, with the horses
and falcons, to accompany the dead chieftain
on his pyre, we can guess whose bones those may
really be, swathed in brocade and tied rovmd with
pearl -studded gold lace, in the glass cases all
round the choir of Xanten Cathedral.

Did the priests who built it divert to their
uses, and christen with their ajipcUations, the
cultus of some Germanic or Scandinavian sun-
god, making the Volsung into a Roman and a
martyr, as they turned Venus into a Sicilian
Saint and Apollo into that Bishop illustrious as
the patron of mineral water ? Or was there

124 THE VICTOR OF XANTEN

really some business of Roman legionaries
martyrized for insubordination to the official
religion ; were there some real Sancti sanctormn,
sanctos, whose ringleader Victor, young, soldierly,
and cruelly murdered, the Middle Ages identified
with their dragon-slaying Siegfried, the very
name Sanctos or Xantos, the other name,
Colonia Trajana, or Trojana, or Troja for
short, suggesting to the clerks thoughts of
youthful heroism and violent death by a river
(" Scamander, which the gods call Xanthus "),
and thus designating that dwindled city of
pilgrimage as the mythical dwelling of the
Northern Achilles ?

There seems, at any rate, an odd network of
coincidences entangling the thought of this town :
Troja and Xanthos and St. Victor and Siegfried.
And when the burly Canon, showing us the
cathedral treasure, took from the huge safe an
ivory Byzantine casket, what do you think he
said in pointing out the toga'd and helmeted
figures carved on its sides, and which, of course,
we connected with St. Victor and his fellow-
martyrs ? "This," said the Geistliche Herr,
clapping his thumb on the delicate ivory — " this,
meine Herrschaften, represents the history of
Achilles."

XIX

THREE OLD GERMAN
PALACES

Oranienhaum, " Orange-tree,"' is a dear little
palace, not belying the sweet and scented
])rininess of its name, although that is derived
from a princess of Nassau-Orange, who inter-
married with these princes of Dessau. Anyhow,
the name produced the thing, and Oranienbaum
is walled round with great glasshouses, full of
century-old orange-trees in tubs ; and also it
is, for the most part, most daintily and amusingly
Chinese ; Chinese, because oranges are called
" China-oranges," and also '' mandarins.'' Make-
believe eighteenth-century Chinese, of course,
with pagodas and Chinamen on wall-papers and
hangings, and slender, lacquered furniture : a
little j)alaee all white and porcelain-blue, and
white and nasturtium-colour, like the precious
vases and tcacu})s and saucers on the shelves.
And outside stretches a tiny park of willow-
pattern canals, like those on the screens and
chintzes, and yews and arbor-vita* out of toy

boxes. And the only use to which the little

125

126 THREE OLD GERMAN PALACES

palace is put seems to be furnishing the oranges
for a kind of sweetmeat for which Dessau is, it
seems, famous : thick slabs of marbly sugar,
tasting oijleur d' or anger and of the old-fashioned
houses where that gentle beverage is placed, in
gilt Murano bottles, by one's curtained and
valanced bed.

From Oranienbaum we drove to Worlitz,
another palace and park of the most opposite
style, but quite as characteristic : hillocks
contrived in a flat country, lakes and streams
where there is no water ; artificial wildernesses,
with artificial ruins and grottos ; and rustic
paths baffling the wearied wish to get along.
A place which, in its playing at nature, tells of a
state of mind less natural even than that of the
peruked people who made the Chinese-rooms and
clipped the yews into vases and ninepins at
Oranienbaum.

While dragging unwilling feet through this
deliberate romance of Worlitz, I was additionally
vexed by the thought that Goethe, if one may
judge by the parks and gardens in his " Wahlver-
wandschaften," would have liked it all, perhaps
even tried to lay out something similar.

One can only excuse him and explain such
places as these by the fact that our great-grand-
fathers (when thej^ chanced to be Princes,
Electors, or Goethes !) had not yet really the
habit of the country ; fields and neighbourhoods
oITending their sense of dignity ; and also that
their very clothes, embroideries, and v/igs, for-

THREE OLD GERMAN PALACES 127

bade their gratifying a passion for Nature
otherwise than on gravelled walks, and within
easy refuge in a Grecian portico. Also, such a
park as this of Worlitz is surely referable to
certain national characteristics, which happened
to be dominant in the late eighteenth century.
The German soul indulges freely in a kind of
imaginative dumb-crambo, a childlike snatching
at emotional suggestion, and neglects, at times,
the real aspect of things. This makes the
German an incomparable organizer of the
picturesque (every old German town is there to
prove it), a romantic poet and a musician.
But the drawbacks of this tendency are such
things as this park of Worlitz in the past, and
as the mise-en-scene of " Parsifal," let us say,
in the present. And as such drawbacks of
great national gifts of sentiment and romance,
we ought, perhaps, to accept them in a spirit
of grateful amusement.

By an odd irony, these two so-diiTerently
artificial palaces of Oranicnbaum and Worlitz
are girdled round, like the town of Dessau itself,
by the very real romance of forests. We skirted
them on our return, along grassy, swampy
places dotted with huge oaks, and yellowing
thickets of beech and impenetrable blackness of
fir. It was a cold, clear, autumn evening, with
mists rising ofT the lawns. Everywhere deer
galloped across the path. And, stopping to
watch the big horned herds at j)asturc, we heard
the call of the stags in the forest ; a lion-like

128 THREE OLD GERMAN PALACES

roar, giving a queer sense of remoteness and
mystery to the place and hour, and making
one forget both the 1820 romanticaUties of
Worhtz, and the dapper blue-and-yellow chine-
series of Oranienbaum.

II

After the rush, crush, and strain of two days
of the Wagner performances, all that crude
appeal to a bullied imagination, we had an
afternoon of long, leisurely reality at the
Eremitage, the meeting with certain dear friends
of former years colouring the waking hours into
dreams and poetry.

The cosmopolitan crowd had cleared out as
by magic, and the wide, wet streets of Bayreuth
were left to the scanty inhabitants of its seven-
teenth- and eighteenth-century houses, and to
the market women, presided over with Bernini
gallantry by a fountain-Cupid black with the
damp of these shallow valleys and the smoke
of their breweries. We drove first to the road-
side inn called Rollwenzellei, attracted by the
thought of Jean Paul, its whilom guest, and also
of a particular kind of gauffred cake called
Spritzkuchen, whose baking revealed itself fra-
grantly in the little room (with a gallant pastoral
on the stove), where you are shown the manu-
scripts and portraits of the author of Siebenkds.,
Having insidiously secured a supply of fresh
Spritzkuchen intended for the farewell meal of

THREE OLD GERMAN PALACES 129

Kundry and several chapel-masters, we con-
tinued to the niargravial villa of Eremitage.
The road ran between great lime-trees, and the
scent of their belated blossoms mingled with the
faint autumnal smell of soaked yellow leaves
and of freshly ploughed earth. It had poured
all the morning, and the afternoon was veiled
and turned into premature evening by the
steaming woods and fields. The park was
utterly empty. We mopped up a table and
chairs under the dripping limes, and had our
colTee, along with the jnrated Spritzkuchen, in
front of the long low line of what must have
been the niargravial kitchens and offices.

For the two little palaces are as devoid of all
similar practical places as the castle of the fairy
who was served by invisible hands. They are
abodes only of the leisure of princes and prin-
cesses and their favourites : semi-circular suites
of small, low Louis XV chambers, with supper-
and card-tables, of Chinese closets and music-
rooms with gold fiddles and lutes embossed upon
the panels. The creepers and hornbeam-hedges
almost touch the long French windows, and shed
a green and cavernous light on to the polished
parquets and into the darkened mirrors. There
is no trace of habitation more recent than that
of the pcruked margraves and stomaehcrcd
margravines, who, with their circle of Pompadour
ladies-in-waiting, look down from the walls ;
faces all run to jjouting lips and wanton eyes,
with that odd look of anmscd satiety and civil in-

130 THREE OLD GERMAN PALACES

science, as of so many intriguing ladies'-maids and
pandering valets, Figaros and Susannas, which
Continental painters of the early eighteenth
century contrive to give to their highest-born
sitters. Listless, diminished ghosts of mean
realities, being sucked, with the sunken-in
oil-paint, into dark nothingness ! Yet what a
grace and a manner they had, and a furbelowed
fancy, too — they and the inglorious artists who
ministered to their caprices ! Round the semi-
circular palace runs a colonnade whose pillars
are compacted of various flints and copper-
ores, of unlikely smoky moonstone, white and
turquoise-blue, striped and patterned like a
Louis XV silk when you look close; but when
you stand ofr taking the appearances of some
elaborate confectionery nougat of frosted almonds
and pistachios. And in the middle of the build-
ing is the domed Sonnentempel, where, sur-
rounded by stucco orange- and lemon-boughs,
but with the scent of the real orangery coming
through the windows, the Hohe H errs chaf ten
worshipped their own ease round the now silent
central fountain. . . .

The afternoon light, with sudden pale yellow
gleams among the long hornbeam arbours and
the sweeping beeches and limes, was fading in
the little hunting-palace, when the housekeeper
led us up to the portrait of the wicked Duchess
of Orlamiinde, and said : " That is the White
Lady."

And that she undoubtedly is, regardless of

TimEE OLD GET^MAN PALACES 131

the fact that the Herzogiii von Orlamiinde
murdered her children from love for the Markgraf
of Xiirnberg somewhere in the thirteenth century,
if at all ; and that this Peter Lely Huntress
wears the open-bosomed dress and the frizzled
curtain hair of a Hampton Court Beauty. But, in
calling her the Weisse Dame, the tradition of
Eremitage housekeepers is certainly right. And
it is she, she and no other, who haunts this
palace and all other palaces of the Hohenzollerns,
boding them evil.

For her palest blue-and-lilac dress is woven
of the cloud-veiled moonbeams of murderous
nights, and her hunting-spear is poised in
homicidal intent. The eyes look out of the
white face, following and watching. And these
wicked dark eyes are like those of her mother,
whose rulTed and farthingaled likeness hangs in
the same room, only their evil look remaining
of that blurred and blackened painting. Nay,
what is worse, the eyes are those also of a little
child — her child ? — whose likeness is near the
window, so that in the gathering dimness of that
low pale room you can distinguish quite plainly
its stiif velvet coroneted cap, and the sceptre
in its little hands. The baby looks at you with
the same dark glance of its grandmother and its
mother, its m^Aher who killed it. It is those
eyes which haunt the palace. One can imagine
that in the twilight something which had seemed
an old silk chair or shimmering lacquered
cabinet, far away in one of the distant rooms

182 THREE OLD GERMAN PALACES

which that circular building allows you to look
into — one can imagine it to discover itself to be
no longer what you had thought, sheen of stuff
or of marqueterie, but moon-and-cloud-coloured
draperies and a moon-white face.

" But none of these is the room where she
haunts. We shall come to it in a minute, if the
Herrschaften will have patience," says the
housekeeper's daughter.

"And here," she resumes after we have
passed through two more darkening apartments,
" here is the room where the White Lady
appeared to the Emperor Napoleon."

A small room at the end of that semi-circular
palace : pale-blue walls, deep-green hangings ;
and in an alcove, curtained and valanced, a
narrow bed faded to sea-green. The room was
dim in the twilight of the high hornbeam hedges ;
and in that mist of blue and green, we understood
that the truly terrible thing there was not the
ghost, not even the White Lady, but that
narrow alcoved bed where one would lie awaiting
the rustle of her faded silvery skirts, the white
vision of her deep-eyed face.

We lingered, we two old friends, in that room
till we could bear it no longer ; and found the
others already far outside, round the basin
where the tritons no longer spout, where the
sunset rays lingered at the end of an arched
hornbeam avenue. Our companions had not
submitted like us to the spells of the White
Lady ; and the children in years or spirit were

THREE OLD GER^UN PALACES 133

trying how one could march to the Bim-Bam,
Bum-Bum, of the Parsifal bells, and rehearsing,
in no very reverent intention, the leaps and
shouts of Kundry bringing " Balsam. . . ."

We drove back through the misty park, and
through that long avenue of lime-trees, with
pale, unreal washes of ploughed field and marshy
meadow and distant belts of forest lying beyond,
to where the little eighteenth-century court-
houses of Bayreuth begin.

This afternoon among the ghosts of Eremitage,
and in the company of those dear friends, met
after so many j'cars only to be parted again,
these pale unreal hours of premature autumn
twilight, remain for me, unworthy ! the one real
memory, the one thing which I treasure, of
those Festspiel days at Bayreuth.

XX

THE SALVATORSKIRCHE AT
COBURG

One of the things which charmed me most at
Coburg (and everything had a charm that day of
return to Germany) was the little Salvatorskirche ;
and perhaps because it has so little in it save
what one's fancy could put in. It stands
among the trees of its former cemetery, hard by
the ramparts, a tiny box and tucked-in belfry.
An old woman let us in, resuming her work of
cleaning salads in a bowl, and scraping little
mushrooms, which she had spread out in a corner
of the church, alongside of a row of long rusty
nails, both culled perhaps in the fat soil of the
former graveyard. The little church is quite
poor and quite bare : whitewashed walls, white
pews and gallery. Nothing in it but the sacra-
ment-table and the board with psalm numbers ;
and for sole ornament a few carved tombstones.
Ihey were scrolled and cherubed around, and
the language, setting forth both the hopes of
future bliss and the various past services in
aristocratic connexions of the defunct burghers,
suggested the curls of Uamillics-^vigs and the
knots of Sunduy-laccd Steinkcrques.

135

136 THE SALVATORSKIRCHE AT COBURG

And there among all these references to High-
noble, and Imperial-privileged high well-born
employers, and Ritterguts and Kmnmerguis,
where the deceased Herr Motschmann or Herr
Pfefferkorn had had the honour of being born,
was a little slab with the bare fact that here
rested the wife, most beloved in marriage
(Eheliebste), of Herr Heinrich Ernst Angerstein,
aged twenty-four, and of his only little son,
Michael Friderikus, aged five months. . . .
Prosaic little burghers, and a prosaic little
church. But it was such bare, whitewashed
churches, with nothing in them to please the eye,
and no memories more inspiring than those of
Herr Motschmann's and Herr Pfefferkorn's
awaiting, peruked and cravated, for their own
and their betters' resurrection, it was just such
places as this Salvatorskirche, of Coburg, which
were once peopled, filled, crowded, with the
winged multitudes, ascending, descending,
swirling, deploying, in ordered legions, and
gathering into concentric blazes of musical glory,
of Bach's organ fugues ; and with the bands of
erect archangelic chords, shoulder to shoulder,
like rows of gigantic saints, of his chorals.

I have said that this day at Coburg (it was
chilly and showery, but that did not matter)
had for me the delight of return to Germany ;
I mean to such impressions as only Germany can
give to our heart and fancy. It began with the
first look out of my window. By the clemency
of the Improvers, a tiny piece of town rampart

THE SALVATORSKIRCIIE AT COBURG 137

had not yet been turned into residences of
retired bureaucrats, and the Golden Grape Inn
faced a row of Httlc old house-backs, covered with
slate or painted pale green and rose colour, with
immensely steep cijelettcd red roofs, and attics
where cats sat in meditation, all seen above a
screen of birch-trees, and surmounted by the
cock of the chief church-tower : roofs and
attics for childish adventures, little houses for
the dwelling of German Kays and Gerdas,
with possible dangers from the Snow Queen.
Leaning a little out, I could see the gate-tower,
with its wet, silvery onion-cap. And through
this gate one went straight into the chief street
of the tiny city.

So small is this dear town of Coburg that
before resorting, in true Germanic fashion, to
a Condilorei for refreshment, we had walked
through and through, round and round it, in the
intermittent gleams and showers, perpetually
returning to the same spots, when we expected
it least, but always with new pleasure. First of
all to the market-place, where they fry sausages
under the beautiful Louis XV town hall, and the
vegetable stalls are spread in front of one of those
stately Jacobean (we should say) buildings,
which, with their obelisked- and statued-angles,
always remind me of the i)Oops of State galleys,
and suggest that they nmst iiave originated
in Holland or the Ilanse j)orts, and been towed
inland along canals. The back of liic ducal
l)alacc (the front being strictly Prince Consort

138 THE SALVATORSKIRCHE AT COBURG

in style) is of this same gallant and pompous
High Dutch Jacobean, not entirely unlike the
architecture and panelling of an Oxford
College ; and which is given its date by the
statue presiding over a similar building, a Euke
Casimir, rufTed and moustachioed and booted and
sashed in the fashion immediately preceding the
Thirty Years' War. And with the Ihirty
Years' War, as in nearly ail old German towns,
there is a sudden cessation of all building, public
and domestic ; and the rest of Coburg is of
the early eighteenth- century and under distinctly
French influence : burghers' houses, many-
windowed, shapely, but plain, with just a fine
wrought-iron grating or a charming bit of
stucco-w^ork over the wide house-door, behind
which the family coach was once remised. I
wish I could convey the charm of these houses
(as of the simple, stately, well-constructed first
movement of an early eighteenth-century sonata
or aria), particularly of some forming the pre-
cincts, so to speak, of the chief church of Coburg.
They seem all to be inhabited by ecclesiastical
worthies ; Hofprediger, Kirchenrath, Organist,
&c. ; and they face the effigies of burly divines
in leg-of-mutton sleeves and gauffred rufis, stuck
erect round the church walls under the lancet
windows. There are posts and chains about the
place, and the faded leaves float down and
lie undisturbed under the lime-trees, the stillness
being broken only by the playhours and the
drill of the boys from the church school. And,

THE SALVATORSKIRCIIE AT COBURG 139

as we passed and repassed in front of this most
engaging row of houses (one, particularly, dated
1729, under the Coburg escutcheon, with shutters
and \\'indow-frames, doors of an exquisite grass-
green against the whitewash), severe and
bandeaux'd profiles of ecclesiastical ladies
vanished from window-mirrors. In such houses,
in such sequestered corners of sleepy, prosperous,
half-mediaeval towns, I said to myself, must have
lived the great folk, the Aulic Councillors and
Court preachers, of Jean Paul's novels. And not
a stone's-throw olf an inscription tells one that
Jean Paul himself lived, one year only — 1803-4
— of what must have been his wandering life.
At first it seems quite inappropriate, for this
house, through some traveller's freak, has the
classic air, with Corinthian pilasters between the
windows, of a Louis XV palace built by Gabriel.
But, going in, without mounting the fine
eighteenth-century staircase, one can penetrate
through a ground-floor passage into a black,
narrow yard, with De Hoogh pails and brooms
about : and thence enter a little garden, on to
which open the windows of the poorer lodgers.
The little garden is a mere widcning-out of that
grimy yard, with but a few poor lilac bushes
and a plot of rank grass. But it looks up, as no
street-front ever couUl, on to the stecj), steep,
climbing roofs of the church, scarlet and orange
in the wet sunset flush as if geranium and
nasturtium petals had been set edge to edge to tile
it. It looks up into the silvery slate pagodas

140 THE SALVATORSKIRCHE AT COBURG

of the two belfries, wonderful bulbs, like hyacinth
roots and hyacinth-glasses, bulging and tighten-
ing, as if under the breath of a fanciful glass-
blower, and ending off in lances and weather-
cocks against the moist purple sky. And the
windows looking both down into this little
black yard and dank, green garden, and up into
the fantastic climbing and bubble-bulging of
those roofs and belfries, must have been Jean-
Paul's, and, no doubt, also those of his Siebenkas
" Advocate of the Poor," and of his wife Lenette.
I must not leave off talking of Coburg (and I
leave off unwillingly !) without taking note of the
school which is built alongside of that Salva-
torskirche, the shrill cries of its playground
coming over the w^all. For in a thicket of the old
churchyard, among the black tree-trunks and
mossy headstones, we discovered two tiny little
girls, kneeling before a bench and busily writing
capital U's in their copy-books : U — U — U — U,
like a series of soft little hootings of baby-owls.
Meanwhile below the trees and bench, the
burgesses of Coburg and their wives, once bob-
wigged and cravated, or farthingaled and
stomachered, the Pfefferkorns and Angersteins,
await, as their inscriptions tell us, the Resurrec-
tion of the Flesh. And it has, so to speak,
arisen already, and is writing rows of capital
U's (U — U — U — U, baby-owlet-hoots) in copy-
books on a bench above the graves.

XXI

THE GRAVE OF WIELAND AND
THE MAN IN THE RAIN

The chief adventure, this time at Weimar, was
going to Ossmanstctt to see the grave of Wicland.
Not that I am aware of ever having read a

»

single Hne of his ; but after seeing the vault
with Schiller and Goethe, and admiring the
wreath wherewith " enthusiastic schoolgirls from
Antwerp " had adorned the monument of
Frau von Stein, one naturally thought of any
additional item in that place of Death and Glory,
So, " Where is Wieland ? " I asked. The stout
and stolid small girl presiding over Frau von
Stein's mortality and immortality said she had
nothing to do with him ; he was buried in the
park of his country house. On this, and in a
manner which disconcerted my sense of Past and
Present, my fellow-traveller suddenly remem-
bered that an own great-aunt of hers was
buried along with that poet in his Landgiii at
Ossmanstctt. So for Ossmanstctt and Wieland's
grave we accordingly set out.

We drove in a vast and ancient landau which
blocked the rutty road, and nearly heaved over

into the flowery ditches whenever wc met tlic

141

142 THE GRAVE OF WIELAND AND

hooded carts returning at foot's-pace from the
morning's market. Leaving on one side that funny
Utile palace of Tiefurt, where Goethe and his
Grand Duke once took their holidays, our road
lay along the barely undulating slopes of ripening
wheat and green oats of this wide, comfortable
country which is so oddly at variance with
Weimar's classic pretensions. There were little
cherry and plum trees all along, and here and
there a village, tucked with geranium roofs in a
green hole, or marking a slight rise with barns
and onion-towered castle, exactly like the
villages in those cheap coloured prints which
reproduce the pathetic homeliness of the lie of
the land, and the sentimental romance of the
dwelling-places, of so much of Central Germany.
We had just got into one of these villages,
flocks of geese disporting in its gutter, when a
great storm, which had been hurrying after us,
burst in floods over our landau. However, the
graves of Wieland and of Sophie Brentano (for
hers it was, Bettina's sister) could no longer be
very far off ; so, the driver having pulled on an
ancient livery coat of Weimar colours, whose
manifold cape (the thing was once, I think; called
a Joseph) may well have seen not Wieland and
Sophie's graves, but Wieland and Sophie's selves,
we splashed on to the inn at Ossmanstett. I
own to having felt shy and foolish on arrival : the
people at the inn would surely take us for
lunatics. Indeed, I hastily composed a speech
explaining our absurd dripping pilgrimage by

THE MAN IN THE RAIN 143

family piety to my companion's great-aimt ;
and, after all, does she not possess a little black
silhouette of her, with frizzled toupe which looks
like an additional profile ? But the Grand
Duchy of Sachsen- Weimar is broken in to any
amount of worship of illustrious dead. A small
girl, as matter-of-fact as the one who had shown
us the grave of Frau von Stein, was deputed to
conduct us, with borrowed umbrellas, to the
last resting-place of "Wieland and Sophie. We
picked our way across the mud-streaming
village street, past several large barns (of which
more anon), and into the garden of Wieland's
whilom house, which remained deaf to all our
ringings. So, with the rain pelting down, we
let ourselves be guided by the child across
sopping lawns and under the dripping branches
of the park. Thus we proceeded, through what
was presumably (for tucked-down umbrellas hid
all the upper world) an avenue of limes clipped
into a long arbour, and sweeping the grass with
its skirts, until we came to a dank place along a
flowery little stream. The child bade us look
up ; and there, under black, soaking trees, was
the object of our quest. It is a pyramid of
stone, blackened by damp, but bearing on each
of its faces a name : Wieland's own, his wife's,
and Sophie Brentano's, with an emblem apiece
— a lyre for the poet, a butterfly for the poor girl,
who died at twenty-five, and clasped hands for
Frau Anna Dorothea, the wife whose trustfulness
and devotion made all tiiis romantic friendship

144 THE GRAVE OF WIELAND AND

possible. And running round the whole monu-
ment was a distich expressive of the love of these
three long-dead people.

The rain was still falling, dimpling the stream
between the tresses of water daisy, and trickling
from off the monument and also from off the
borrowed umbrellas under which we stood in
contemplation. The situation was comic, for we
had kilted our skirts to our knees and stood with
soaked thin shoes in the spongy beech-leaves,
while the child from the inn waited with the
stolid reverence of a sexton. Yet I confess to
having felt deeply moved, and not the less for the
thought that, incredible as it seemed, the
romantic girl who had been buried there a
hundred and nine years ago was the aunt of my
fellow-traveller's mother, the sister of her
grandmother : something far nearer to her, in
reality, than I, her modern companion.

The rain continued in floods, and we wanted
to await our famous landau in the porch of
Wieland's former home. But its only inhabi-
tant was a very large watch- dog, who prowled
and growled around us with red eyes ; so there
was nothing for it but to follow the child back up
the village road, and take refuge, while she went
on to the inn, under the wide archway of a barn
hard by. A man was already standing there,
sheltering, like us, from the downpour. My
first glance decided that he must be the village
idiot. But he had on Sunday clothes and held a
little bundle tied to a travelling stick. Then my

THE ]\L\N IN THE RAIN 145

companion noticed that his poor, blear, beard-
less face, like that of some puzzled Low Dutch
saintly Van Eyck or Memling, was wet, not with
rain only, but with tears, and that his mouth
was trembling. My friend accosted him and
asked where he was going. He answered that
he was in search of his wife, who had gone crazy
and left him, taking his police papers away with
her. He had thought to overtake her at Apolda,
but at that place she had been heard of as at
Erfurt, and he was on his way thither. He had
walked since day-break, and had eaten nothing.
He made no attempt to beg, and accepted the
money we gave him almost without thanks, as
if he scarcely took in my friend's injunctions to
get a meal at the inn and take the next train for
Erfurt ; and his poor, blear, beardless face was
still convulsed with crying. They were childless,
he said, but she had not left him with another
man. He was a day labourer, and could get no
work without presenting those police papers she
had carried oIT. He was well spoken and not at
all foolish, but seemed so dazed by grief and
wandering and hunger that we wondered, after-
wards, whether he would not lose that money.
Wc left him still under that barn gateway, waiting
for the rain to stop, with the big dog prowling
and growling in the background.

When wc were about a mile on our homeward
drive the rain did stop, and gleams of sun
caught the wet, bronze-coloured wheat, while the
wind Lore a rift of blue under a great cumulus

146 THE GRAVE OF WIELAND

bank. Looking backwards, we saw the rain
still falling above the park of Ossmanstett, with
Wieland's and Sophie's grave ; but the light,
with a faint rainbow, made against the horizon
a white, wet streak, perhaps in striking on the
face of that little stream. We wondered whether
the poor, blear, weeping man was still under that
gateway, and whether he would find his wife
again. It was an odd contrast with the grave
of the romantic poetic friends under the trees ;
but even as the rain which trickled on that
hundred-years-old tomb had mingled with the
tears on that poor, washed-out, puzzled labourer's
face, so all the adventure was steeped some-
how in the self-same pathos : Sunt lachrymse
rerum ; et mentem mortalia tangunt.

XXII
CASTIGLIONE D'OLONA

When wc had been trotting for an hour along tliat
straight dull road from Milan to the Lakes, dull as
befits the tidy banking-up of glaeier gravel, I
turned to the coachman, amusingly like an old-
world postilion. " Isn't that Castiglione ? '' I
asked. And on his replying that it was, I added
I had thought it must be, because it looked like
the photograph. Now I had never seen a photo-
graph of Castiglione d'Olona ; and this ex-
planation was a shameful lie, improvised, like
most of my occasional lies, to cloak a sentimental
absurdity. You would not have had me tell
that man, in his tarpaulin hat and many-buttoned
jacket, that, at the very first glimpse of the
battlemented village above the poplars in the
narrow river trough, I had longed that this
secluded bit of romance might be Castiglione
d'Olona ; or, if it was not Castiglione, longed I had
the spirit to request the borrowed coachman to
drive me there instead.

For it is not in the least true that I am interested
in the beginnings of Renaissance Realism, about
which I confess to highly mixed feelings ; still

less that I have wished passionately and since

147

148 CASTIGLIONE D'OLONA

years for closer intimacy with that rare MasoHno
da Panicale. But one has to give explanations
in this foolish world, even like that explanation
to the coachman. And it was not possible to
tell my kind hosts on the Lake that I was
sufTering from acute infidelity to Italy ever since
returning there, and therefore snatched at an
opportunity (and a generously lent carriage and
pair) of tasting once more the emotion which
Italy ought to awaken. And this leads me to
say, what I have never admitted before, that I
am full of infidelities in my worship of the Genius
Loci. It often takes me time to become attuned
to change of place. The countries I like best
are frequently those I happen to be leaving.
And this particular return to Italy had not been
in any sense rapturous. . . .

In saying this I do not mean to insinuate that
Masolino's frescoes are a bore. They really
must be exceedingly interesting, since they
succeeded in faintly interesting even me. One
can appreciate, thank heaven (or perhaps, alas !)
when one cannot enjoy. And, believe me, I
appreciated Masolino. This painter keeps a
Giottesque naivete and imagination through all
his young Renaissance Realism, in a way less
common among Tuscans than among North
Italians, such as Jacopo Bellini and Pisanello.
He had their fine romantic quality, delighting in
knights and damsels. He has also that odd half-
Oriental impassiveness of smooth oval faces and
slit eyes, and impeccable manners in unlikely

CASTIGLIOXE D^OLONA 149

moments (Hcrodias on her throne with ladies
averting their eyes from John the Baptist's head,
has an unflinehing air of virtue hke what the
Lady of Vcrgi may liave had when her lover's
heart was served up for supper), that indefinable
remoteness which makes the people of mediaeval
romance so much less like — well, say Wagner ! —
than like the Arabian Nights. Be this as it may,
Masolino has just taken Giotto's invention,
merely extended that lovely little statued and
garlanded })ortieo from being a profile on the flat
into a deep and spacious cloistered yard, leading
the fancy into places and times beyond. But
that seemingly slight change means perspective
and the solidity and structure of things ; and
hence the Renaissance and the coming, presently,
of Raphael and Veronese.

These interesting remarks I made to myself,
afrain as a mere cloak for foolish emotion.
Since emotion I did have at Castiglione d'Olona,
only it was before seeing the frescoes, and also
after I had forgotten all about them. I had that
emotion the whole time I was in the place, and
more or less the rest of the day ; and I knew
I should {jrobably have it, or a shadow of it,
for quite a long while whenever my thoughts
returned thither. It was the Emotion of Italy.
Or, rather, one, perhaps the most poignant and
almost harrowing, of the emotions which Italy
can give. For countries, like ]H'0])!c we love,
have each a set of feelings [their own way of being
lovable and hateful] which they awaken in us,

150 CASTIGLIONE D'OLONA

different from our feelings to any other country,
but differing among themselves, like our varying
response to the various expression and manner
of the same human being : emotions of tenderness
or repulsion, joy or sadness, or all mixed, even
as is the case in the dramas which our fellow-
creatures stir up in our poor foolish hearts.

It is largely a matter of smells. Not merely
because smells have that unrivalled power of
evoking past states of feeling, but because smells
seem to distil and volatilise so many undefinable
peculiarities of season, of climate, and of civilisa-
tion. At Castiglione d'Olona it was all three.
For after I had crossed the chief square of that
village of escutcheoned, dismantled palaces, and
was bruising my feet upon the hard uphill cobbles
leading to the church, there rose to my nostrils
in the autumn afternoon the mingled scents of
long-neglected drains, of sun-dried filth, of mint
crushed underfoot, and, purifying all with its
sense of life and ripeness, the smell of leaves
baked by a summer's heat and fresh from a frosty
dew. That mingled scent meant what cannot
be put into words, the faint thrill of hundreds of
such impressions, long merged and forgotten ;
blurred memories of other solitary walks through
other forlorn little places of the past, between
dust-heaps and palaces, past little corners of
garden and terrace, which might be that where
Romeo's ladder had hung.

Why is Italy full of such places ? Why is its
Past not homely and warm and close to us like

CASTICxLIOXE DOLOXA 151

that of the North, but distant, forlorn, tragic
with the smell of dead leaves and of cliarnel, with
its gaunt show of splendour cruml)ling in base
uses ; a past whereof one often fails to under-
stand the reasons for greatness, and oftcncr
still the reasons for decay ?

I fail, for instance, to understand this little
Castiglione d'Olona. I see how on that flush and
ra})id Alpine river, cutting deep into the moraine
slopes, it may have meant in bygone days mills
(there are some still among poplars) and a ford,
then a bridge, thence a castle, whose walls and
corbels still remain ; perhaps, as consequence,
a great feudal Cardinal, who built the church and
called Masolino from Florence to paint its walls.
But why was this village not a village then ?
Why all these escutcheoned houses, exquisite
carved portals and windows, remains of fresco
and terra-cotta work, everywhere ? And why,
and when, did it begin to be left to crumble in
the hands of peasants ? OfT the piazza, at a
corner, you come upon an exquisite little
Bramantesque church, suddenly and not without
a little shock at the colossal St. Christopher
guarding its door. It is the kind of church, in
that kind of place, which is, in Italy, invariably
locked, unused from year's end to year's end.
There was mystery, therefore, in finding tliat
its worm-eaten door yielded to a push. Open,
but empty ; or, rather, full of the past — an
almost tangible, clammy presence. An exquisite
church of that perfect cruciform wliich is so

152 CASTIGLIONE D'OLONA

rare and lovely, transepts and nave and apse,
equally short, mere recesses from the low,
brooding cupola. There were traces of
fresco, and of fine triumphal Renaissance
tombs, like those of some conquering admiral
in a Venetian church. From the cupola hung
quite the loveliest mediaeval lamp I have ever
seen ; a lantern shaped like certain Gothic
reliquaries, spurred or antlered round with
miniature flying buttresses, each with its gallop-
ing St. George and distressed king's daughter ;
from its fine gargoyled oil vessel dangled a long,
dusty tassel of faded crimson. The little apse
also was hung with crimson brocade, frayed and
stained into colours medicinal and poisonous,
and striped with tarnished silver. And on the
altar stood slender brass candlesticks, flanking a
delicate ciborium, valanced with brocade. The
ghosts of Renaissance prelates must have said
Mass at shuddering chill daybreak. ... It is
impossible to express the charm, the sadness, and
the mystery of this exquisite, empty, forsaken
little church.

To complete my impression of return to Italy,
I was met on leaving that church by the un-
mistakable scent of a funeral torch, though not
a creature was visible throughout the square.

It was then that I noticed the wires and lamps
across the streets. There was electric light in
this place of ghosts, and on the walls, alongside
the delicate brickwork of mediaeval doors and
windows, were rival electioneering posters. I

CASTIGLIONE DOLONA 153

went to buy some picture-postcards in the village
shop. Castiglione cVOlona, cxi)laincd the tobac-
conist who kept it, is a place of daily increasing
manufacturing importance. " Molta vita in-
dustriale," he repeated with pride, and instanced
celluloid combs.

I did not see any trace of them. And, driving
home, I turned back over and over again, until
the belfries and walls of Castiglione d'Olona
liad vanished behind her yellowing poplars in the
meadows, folded back into the past.

Then the cupolas and pinnacles of Monte Rosa
suddenly loomed into sight, carved out of
mother-of-pearl, fabulously high above a bank
of opalescent vapours, against a pure pale
evening sky. Had I really ever cared for any
country except Italy ?

XXIII
CONVALESCENCE AT PISA

I DO not remember what place the doctor had

bidden mc convalescence in after that suicidal

fortnight of influenza. It was certainly not

Pisa. But to Pisa I went, and instantly forjiot

about convalescing or the need of it. Though

now I come to think of it, it is perhaps only after

illness that the soul's sap rises so potently,

covering all things with budding i)romise and

delicate callow enjoyment, sweeping away all

spirtual refuse in the exquisite tidiness of

spring ; one's own })ast playing the part of those

little nests of withered leaves in which the

violets and grasses of March arise incredibly

brand-new.

The afternoon that we arrived at Pisa and the

next morning there were heavy showers, in fact

a good deal of what other folks grumbled at as

bad weather. But I failed to understand what

better could be wished for : the moist, moving

sky carried out the scheme of colour — as of

divincst pigeons -of the wet, weathered marble

and the whitened lead of the cupolas. The walls

of the cathedral, seen through the rain, rose

from its shining terrace like some watery vision

16i

156 CONVALESCENCE AT PISA

out of the sea. The place was rife with sea-
magic. And, indeed, it struck me that these
buildings, in their bull' and silvery pallor, and
their smooth slightness of carving, have much
the same quality as a certain big ribbed seashell,
like an ionic volute, which is the most classic
of all my few cherished possessions. That first
late afternoon we not only wandered through
fitful showers in the cathedral precincts, and to
where the grass fields begin and the gaunt avenue
of planes starts between battered antique statues,
but also, like the vulgarest tourists, we sat in the
Baptistery, listening to the echo : the verger's
guttural falsetto, and a woman's silver voice
turning into organ chords in that magical
dome : the sights and sounds which should
accompany Parsifal's grail-miracle but which
surpass all stagecraft.

And from the steps of the Campo Santo, where
they rise out of the fields of white clover, there
was that view which seems to make itself a-fresh
every time I go to Pisa, and one of whose
delights is, nevertheless, its something inex-
pressibly venerable : a corner of city wall, this
time, of course, with cherry-blossom and palest
budding leaf, against a distant volcanic-looking
hill, framed in by the gable and apse of the
cathedral ; a little view which seems too poignant
to exist excepting in one's memory.

It being a case of convalescence, I had, of
course, to get whatever I fancied ; and what I
fancied was a stroll in those very hills of which

CONVALESCENCE AT PISA 157

that is one. The wish had, as a matter of fact,
been in me for many years, and had seemed
unreasonable — (" What earthly reason is there
for going there when there are so many other
things to sec ? ■') — from its very modesty ; but
now it passed muster as a convalescent's whim,
say. for toast and butter or similar too accessible
dainties. And even now, such is the crooked
complexity of human reason, I felt I must try to
mask that wish with the famous monastery of
Calci, which I had not the faintest desire to see,
and which was really not worth seeing. Or
perhaps it was ; I mean Calci worth seeing.
Anyhow we saw it, and in my happy mood 1
liked it : a vast spread of eighteenth-century
stucco magnificence, with gallant allegorical
paintings presiding over the benches and inky
desks of a girl's school. Monks there were few
or none, save an old Spanish Carthusian sewing at
the machine among the Chartreuse bottles and
postcards and rosaries of the porter's lodge.
With much alacrity he told us in odd Spanish
French that what he was busy with was a pair of
breeches ; men's breeches, tine cidotle dliommc,
he insisted ; though whether implying that
Carthusians were not entitled to wear such, is a
point for theologians. But while he talked with
us my eye had lighted on a garment lying half
finished by his machine, and it puzzled me :
something like a tiny girl's stays, or a chest
protector complicated with braces, of stitf,
ribbed material. " Mon p6rc," 1 asked, curiosity

158 CONVALESCENCE AT PISA

overcoming manners, " what is that ? " " ga — "
he answered unmoved, and much less interested
than in the breeches — " ga — oh, that is a hair-
shirt — c'est un cilice.'"

So, our thoughts bent on mediseval austerities,
and having tasted the monk's Chartreuse, we left
the monastery and went out on the longed-for hill.

We strolled and sat among the old olives on
their grassy terraces, and under the trellises,
still leafless, between the cottages. A flock of
sacrificial-looking horned sheep grazed in a nar-
row gorge filled with phyllirea and bryony, and
hard by some men were chiselling one of the
great round boulders of those hills into the mill-
stone of an olive press. There was also a most
enchanting couple, a small white cock of ex-
quisite patience and politeness towards a delicate,
fussy, and, as I thought, rather tiresome white
hen ; creatures with whom we did not, of course,
become personally acquainted, but watched
from a distance as one does one's betters.

Here and there among the olives, against the
grass, shone out the white ball-dress of a cherry
tree. Storms modelled those beautiful hills,
filling their valleys with alternate sunshine and
transparent smoke of shadow. And the inlets
of the green plain, the creeks of what must once
have been the Mediterranean, were marked every-
where by little ancient churches and belfries
among the olives : a remote, peaceful, venerable
region.

And there, against the sea-line, were the

CONVALESCENCE AT PISA 159

marble miracles of Pisa, looking, at this distance,
the t^vo domes united into a shell, the tower
l>iicked up askew like a horn, for all the world
like a snail taking a walk. As regards those hills
which I had longed for so many years, they had,
on closer approach, even more charm than I had
expected ; a poignancy, almost a pathos, as of
certain passages of Mozart (particularly in the
" Zauberflote " and the " Sonata with Varia-
tions ") which I can never hear without a little
stab of foreshadowed regret.

My convalescence was duly completed, not
by the fulfilment of another wish, but the
discovery of sometliing quite unexpected. In
the course of a solitary ramble, attracted by
the towers and what remains of the city's upper
water gate among the budding poplars, a certain
friend of mine had stumbled into it. For it is
a garden. Or, rather, it is hanging gardens ; in
point of fact the disused citadel of Pisa : bastions
overgrown with ilex and honey-ilowcring bays,
mysterious dank grass plots between, and walls
spaliered with lemons and vast rose-trees, their
crannies tucked full of wattled sheds of freesia.
Those walls, of pale geranium brick coursed with
silvery marble ! You walk on top of them, along
the battlements, up steps and down steps, across
towers and turrets and terraces, on and on almost
for miles ; aerial passages lichencd with orange
and silver like a frayed brocade, leaning over
whose parapet you can gather the shoots of wild
fig and caper in the crevices, or the buds which

160 CONVALESCENCE AT PISA

the great magnolias lift up from the hidden
garden within ; and you look forth north, south,
east, and west to the hills and the distant marble-
mountains, and the swamps and pine-woods and
the sea, over the town and the poplared river
with its barges passing beneath the towers and
walls : a promenade for imprisoned princesses,
or for children the wards of wizards, surely.

But this is not all. In the midst of these
hanging gardens and airy mazes there rises a
little edifice, clapped on the city walls like an
outlook turret or the dome of a chapel, but
which the ancient gardener of the place unlocks
with the mysterious words : " II Caffe-Ausse."
And, behold, a circular saloon, surrounded with
circular divans, and frescoed all over with life-
size Turks and Greeks and fair Circassians
reclining in romantic valleys and sipping cofTee
among shawls and scimitars. These are the
Giaours and Brides of Abydos and Laons and
Cythnas of Byron and Shelley ! Thus did their
readers imagine them ! Nay, thus did those
poets doubtless see them with their mind's eye,
however unlike, in Byron's case, to what was
shown to the mere eye of the body. These
classic Canova graces, these Talma and Madame
Pasta draperies, are what answers to the rhetoric
and sentiment with which even the greatest poets
of that day invested the South and the East.
Such, doubtless, were the rivals whom Guiccioli
may have dreaded in Greece, Maids of Athens
and Ilaydees. . . . Nay, now I come to think

CONVALESCENCE AT PISA 161

of it, Byron and Shelley, in their Pisa days, may
have sat many a time in this very place and gazed
over their own coffee, at the sultanas and pachas
and palikars of the Caffe-Ausse. I feel quite
sure of it. And I like to think this hanging
garden may have belonged to that " Amazing
Marriage '' Irish peeress, own grandmother to my
friend E. F. who dwelt at Pisa, virtuous run-
away >nfe, writing an the education of children
(having left her own behind), befriending Claire
Claremont, and inciting to the liberation of the
Emilia of Epipsychidion. How oddly change
the fashion-plates in accordance with which we
deck and trim our souls ! These people were
Avarmer-hearted in many ways than we, less
dilettantish — even a poseur like Byron going
to his death for Greece ; they candidly believed
that human affairs could be run on a basis of
heroism and romance. And so they sat and
smoked without a smile among the frescoes of
that Caffe-Ausse. What are, one wonders, the
unsuspected humorous traits which will redeem,
nay render lovable, our latter-day ideals and
heroics in the eyes of posterity ? What Caffe-
Ausses are ive too, all unconscious, erecting upon
our childishly desecrated remains of exquisitely
lichened and nobly overgrown ancient masonry ?
Thus thinking about those splendid, funny
immortals of 1820, and even more about the
wizards' wards for whom those aerial labyrinths
were really destined, I went away from Pisa
restored to health, but also, I fear, to prose.

XXIV
BOCCA D'ARNO

I HAVE been lately again to the Mouth of the
Arno. On the way thither we stopped, among
marshy meadows full of poet's narcissus, at the
solitary, forlorn Chureh of Grado, where onee
was Pisa's earliest harbour. As in that other
sea-forsaken plaee, Ravenna, you go into the
chureh down, instead of up, a few steps, giving
it thereby something additionally sepulchral.
It is utterly empty ; a great carved Gothic shrine,
white, silvery, looms therein, haunting its sunken
sea-light. There is a view of this chureh, with
its farm-steadings and pinewoods, in one of the
Campo Santo frescoes of the Life of Saint
Ranicri ; a glory of angels swarms against the
coppery cobalt sky above the roof of the chureh,
quite unmistakable with its belfry. It must
already then, in the fourteenth century, have
been a forlorn, venerable place, with its look,
encrusted as are its walls all round with oriental
majolica and flowered Rliodian bowls, of being
but a great fretted antique marble cofhn,
stranded by some flood of the river. I re-
member my surprise, on descending into it the
first time — it was in aulunm, more than fifteen

103

164 BOCCA D'ARNO

years ago — to find the damp-stained floor strewn
with herbs and shredded myrtle, the thick,
warm, crypt atmosphere smelHng of mountain-
sides.

That first acquaintance with the Church of
Grado was on a fine adventurous occasion. The
Arno was swollen with the September rains, the
water fringed with tiny driftwood, and smelling
of flood. Nevertheless, walking on the lower
wharf of Pisa, we let ourselves be persuaded by
a couple of boatmen, by no means unlike galley-
slaves, who clamoured to row us down to the
Arno's mouth. But when we got back to the
boat after landing to see this very church, we
found a sea wind had arisen, turning the peaceful
brown flood into clear, green rough water ; and,
moreover, that the boatmen had been carousing
in our absence. They were now more than half-
drunk, rather frightened, and, after a mile or
two more, quite unable to make any headway
against the wind brushing the river backwards
with greater and greater violence. So, each of
us taking an oar, my friend and I were glad to
be able to steer the leaky tub into the bushes,
and, leaving our ruffians to return as they best
could, to make the rest of our way by land to
Bocca d'Arno. Looking back upon the absurd
adventure, I believe we had a narrow escape of
being drowned. But since we were not, and
did eventually get to our destination, I am very
glad to have had those four or five miles of,
however dangerous, navigation. The river was

BOCCA D'ARNO 165

so wide, green, rough : the banks were so thickly
set with bushes, high reeds, and vines run wild,
in and out of whieh kept fl^'ing a little bevy of
birds, disturbed by our splashings ; and, turning
round, there was Pisa, reduced to the Cathedral
and Baptistry, at last merely to the Tower,
under the conical hills and storm-clouds. It
seemed the river on which, in one of Boccaccio's
loveliest stories, the faithful Constance let herself
drift out to sea, seeking death, and awaking in
Barbary, in the arms of her Martuccio.

The Arno takes on a great solemnity as it
approaches the mouth, flowing through marshy
meadows outlined against the sky by distant
domes of pinewoods. And then there was the
meeting of river and sea ; the first I had ever
beheld in these tideless regions. Lashed by a
violent south-westerly wind, the Mediterranean
was roaring in great white waves, apparently,
as we looked down the river, above tlie land,
above the sands and the pinewoods. Towards
this foaming bar went the river ruffled back by
the wind, yet marvellously quiet in its massive
steadiness ; and thus, mysteriously, unseen, the
waters met ; no trace of river in that moving
wall of waves, no trace of sea in the steady, Avidc,
rippled river ; the secret meeting accompanied
by a procession of wattled huts on posts, each
rhythmically swaying, dropping and raising its
huge spider net with its black spars and cranes,
as if in some slow rite of salutation of those two
watery divinities.

166 BOCCA D'ARNO

When we had got to the sands, which at that
time were still unprofaned by houses, we sat
for a long time on an upturned boat drawn in
on shore. The sea roared with the noise of
distant cannon ; the river, under the wind,
made the sound as of shaken silk, of a calm sea.
The sun set briefly behind heaped-up clouds,
where, half an hour before, the island of Gorgona
had reclined, like Medusa's head (or John
Baptist's !), on the silver charger of the waters,
livid blue, mysterious. Then there remained
of the sunset only a few burning gashes above the
sea. But at that moment, up the river, opposite,
the September moon arose above the hills, full,
red with the redness of the vanished sunset,
reddening the river and the bar of the sea.

That was, as I said, the first time I had ever
seen the mouth of a great tideless river. It has a
classic beauty, as of the Greek conception of
death, compared with the drama, the tragedy,
the alternating tidal fury and stagnant emptiness
of our northern estuaries. And the ending of
this Mediterranean river, full, flush, smooth,
was made more solemn by the solitude, the
boats and nets, with their primeval look, bringing
home that the centuries have had nothing to
say to that endless happening : the sea slowly
retreating, the river gently, invisibly, adding
grain by grain, inch by inch to the land.

Such was Bocca d'Arno fifteen and more years
ago. Since then the meeting-place of those
divinities of waters has, as happens to all such

BOCCA D'ARNO 1G7

sanctuaries, been desecrated by mankind's sadly
brutal love of air and water.

That is why I have said nothing of this second
visit to Bocca d'Arno ; but ■svisli to keep some
record of tliat first one. On this occasion wc
drove back, saddened, through the miles of
stone pine avenue of San Rossore, the gold-dust
of sunset hanging about the woods on the
horizon. And it was dusk when we re-entered
the gates of Pisa, and the grassy place where
the Cathedral and Baptistry stand, huge marble
reliquaries cast up by the retreating sea of
Time.

XXV

THE DOCKYARD OF
VIAREGGIO

There is an a?sthctic virtue, more certainly
even than a moral one, in the fact of not having
too much ; short commons stimulating the spirit
to extract all the interest and beauty -which
things themselves contain, and to add ^vhatever
thev lack from its own riches. I recognize that
this is the case (and am glad to recognize it)
while tasting the modest charm of Viareggio
after those days at Portofino. That siren sea,
those more than Grecian hillsides and capes,
have the splendour and aloofness of classic
poetry, or rather of mythology enriched almost
to cloyingness by Swinburne or d'Annunzio ;
and one turns away with the " Too much !
Too much ! " of Tannhiiuscr at the Venusberg.
Instead of which, how much intimate pleasant-
ness, and even amusement, there is in these pale,
straight sands, and pale sea barely breaking into
while ; in tin; wide streets of little shut-up
houses ; in the whitish colours of things under
the whitish scirocco sky ; how one appreciates
in this modern place whatever tells of former

times : the Lucchese Palace, said to be haunted

160

170 THE DOCKYARD OF VIAREGGIO

and evidently uninhabited, by the port ; and
the score of houses of the original bathing-place,
now stranded far back by the receding Medi-
terranean, with their meagre grace of Empire
pilasters and lintels. And, over it all, the peace-
fulness, almost the pathos, of a season-place out
of its season ; shut up, asleep, doors and shutters
bolted.

At this time of year Viareggio asserts itself
as a harbour and dockyard. In the general
somnolence the clatter of saws and chisels
becomes heroic ; the skeleton boats and those
heeled over for repairs resume their importance
of centuries ago, when ships were still made
with an adze ; and the one-masters turning the
corner of the pier, sailing of evenings up the
canal, with their few basketfuls of fish or little
load of sulphur or of wine, become, well ! what
exactly similar craft may have been in Genoa
or the Port of Pisa hundreds of years ago, nay,
in the days when the Greeks first settled at the
mouth of Arnus, and the Sicilian traders built a
temple to Aphrodite Erycina where now are
Lerici and Porto Venere. This predominance
of the port and of the dockyard, with its making
and mending of boats, in every stage, from sawing
planks to ramming tow into old keels, gives
Viareggio, moreover, the moral charm without
which all aesthetic and romantic quality leaves
but an evil after-taste and a grittiness between
the teeth.

One is so sickened by the prostitution of Italy

THE DOCKYARD OF VIAREGGIO 171

to idle strangers, or rather so sickened by the
effects thereof (it being a case, like that of La
Rochefoucauld's light lady, ^vhcre the chief sin
is almost the least), that the absence of it has an
actual value of grace and dignity, comparable
to that of the juicy grass, the free-gro^ving un-
pollarded olives, the unshorn brushwood of these
neighbouring hills ; and of those running waters,
as we saw them vesterdav, bubbling over the
great washing-trough at Stiava. The twenty or
thirty women washing in that living stream
scarcely turned round to notice us ; and the
small girl who carried our basket uphill dis-
appeared after setting it down, unconscious of
the possibility of tips. After Portofino and its
villageful pressing its poor lace, its postcards
and nosegays on to tourists, there is more than
relief, there is actual pleasure, in such an
attitude on the people's part.

This indilTerence towards the forestiere (the
very children in Viareggio harbour arc too
absorbed in the caulking and sawing and forging
ship-iron and loading and unloading to notice
one), and the look of comfort and decency in
this Lucchesc country, have always doubled its
attractions for me. One can accept the human
and modern element ; one can think of the real
and the present instead of l)liuking I hem, and
giving too much attention to the past and the
imaginar}-, as happens wherever, in Venice,
Rome, the Riviera, and, alas ! even in Florence,
the Present and the Ileal attacks one with mere

172 THE DOCKYARD OF VIAREGGIO

misery and self-advertisement. The Italy of
beggars and backsheesh and Grand Hotels and
antiquaries' shops is, for the more sensitive
among us, a tawdry theatrical concern, suggest-
ing lath and tinsel, smelling of paraffin, and such
that the soul cares not to penetrate into. Instead
of which, in the presence of people decently living
their own life one can live, so to speak, with the
whole of one's sensitiveness and imagination,
and thus obtain, even aesthetically, the fulness
and depth of enjoyment which is not merely
sesthetic. I flatter myself that it was this
which Wordsworth meant in those lines of the
" Prelude " :

. . . more to every sense
Delicious, seeing that the sun and sky.
The elements, and seasons as they change.
Do find a worthy fellow-labourer there.
Man free, man working for himself with choice
Of time, and place and object. . . .

Surely, it is this sense of human dignity in
Wordsworth, of human freedom and intellect in
Shelley, which give to both of them their fuller
harmonies, their richer timbre and makes us feel,
we scarcely know why, that, immature and
redundant and platitudinous or verbose as they
too often are, they belong to a finer race, they
can give and they can elicit more, than a mere
perfect artist like Keats.

It fits into this kind of impression that the
special loveliness of this little seaport lies in

THE DOCKYARD OF VIAREGGIO 173

Avhat has given it health and prosperity : the
great canals which have drained into rich grass-
land and rice-field what, a century ago, was a
malarious swamp whither the Republic of Lucca
sent its murderers to die slowly of fever like
Dante's Pia. These canals are shallow, but
rapidly flowing and brimful, like English rivers ;
they widen into barely rippled ponds, not without
grace of water-lilies, wherever the big barges
have dredged out sand for the sawmills of the
neighbouring marble mountains ; and they lead,
through fields of greenest grass and of brown and
golden sedge, to the pure blue circle of the little
Lake of Massaciuceoli. One felt miles, or rather
countries, away from the rocks and olive-groves
where we had watched the women washing the
previous day. It might have been Norfolk or
Holland. But towards sunset the mists dis-
solved, and the great marble mountains emerged
little by little, crags and })eaks as high as any
Alps, because they root not in high inland valleys,
but in the sea-marsh and the sea.

Wc were rowed and sailed by an amusing but
rather alarming person, a one-legged ex-sailor,
whose nimblcness with his stump and crutch,
and his glibness in a sort of Levantine pidgin-
Italian made him fit for some picaresque sea-
romance of Defoe or Stevenson, a Jack Tar, of
all sinister trades and escaped galley-slave at
the least. But he owned only to having spent,
poor creature, several years in various hospitals,
and to receiving a pension from an Ocean-Liner

174 THE DOCKYARD OF VIAREGGIO

which had crushed his leg with a kiggage-crane.
Nay, he presently acquired a romantic and lyric
character, instead of his original Treasure- Island
suggestion, by informing us that it was his grand-
father, only recently deceased, who had dis-
covered the body of Shelley in the sand near
the pinewoods. Perhaps it is not uncommon
among Viareggio mariners to have grandfathers
who picked up, or nearly picked up, Shelley
eighty-nine years ago.

But, be this as it may, I forgot all about the
canals, and the Ocean-Liner, and the pirate-ship,
and my mind was filled with one of those visions
of which it is impossible (like the story of the
boatman's grandfather) to determine whether
they are of the nature of reality or delusion.
I saw the little Elzevir uEschylus (or was it
Plato?), with the pencil scrawl of "I awake
from dreams of thee," which had been in that
drowned man's pocket. Mr. Browning had
shown it me years ago, or Mr. W. Rossetti.
Or . . . had I dreamt it all ? With the vision
and the doubt, I was put ashore in the dockyard
of Viareggio.

XXVI

VALLOMBROSA

I ARRIVED at Vallombrosa, coming up from the
June swelter of Florence, to find its rocks and
forests veiled in chilly mists ; an impression of
extraordinary back-of-beyondness in this half
invisible place, reached, with the mysterious
rapidity almost of a lift, by the little funicular
railway. There was an avenue of big trees, dis-
appearing rapidly into the white fog ; wide
meadows fitfully revealed ; a great boulder with
the hogged mane of a cutting in firwoods ; and,
when we looked down from that place, with the
belfry, the fortified towers of the abbey appearing
and disappearing below, I had a feeling of
remoteness and extreme improbability after my
two hours' journey from home.

I should explain, if such things are explicable,
that m this quarter of a century and more it had
never occurred to me to go to Vallombrosa.
The name meant a mountain-side visible almost
from my house step, tapestry-green and blue in
summer, violet and rosy in autumn sunsets ; and
in winter charming me (so that I often walked to
some height whence the whole range was

visible) with the sudden drama of its snow-

175

176 VALLOMBROSA

storms, white and ultramarine blue among
the clouds. And when once a piece of land-
scape has thus become a familiar background,
our fancy is oddly sluggish in thinking of it as a
place in which one can be, and to which one
might go. Be this as it may, and to bear out my
belief that the most impressive journeys are those
within sight of one's own home, the discovery of
Vallombrosa had been reserved for my — I really
believe — thirty-fourth year at Florence.

By the next morning the mist had cleared off.
After the heat and stuffiness of the plain, what
an impression, on going out, of coolness, fresh-
ness, scent of grass and flowers, song of birds, of
everything that is not, so to speak, the refuse of
oneself ; a feeling which slakes the thirst of one's
soul, and washes one's dust-clogged thoughts.
I went to sit on the wood's edge behind
the little garden of the School of Forestry ;
and got into the habit of returning there, day
after day, as long as I remained on that divine
mountain-side. That little garden had the
delightfulness of something exotic : scant, none
of your Italian summer excess of vegetation, just
a few flowers, cared for, showing a little difficulty
of growth, as in an English cottage-garden. But
here and there, affirming Italy, an old gate,
architectural and finely cut, of the monks' time ;
and behind the trees, the belfry and towers, the
extent of the former monastery.

This presence, not so much of the monastic
element (though there certainly is a hushed and

VALLOMBROSA 177

dibciplined quality in that) as of the urbane and
ornate architecture of the Seventeenth Century
among these lonely forests, is to my mind a chief
charm of Vallombrosa. Come upon in the woods
in tabernacles and chapels and flights of steps,
these copings and bevellings, pilasters and
volutes lose all their city ostentation and strike
one as merely deliberate and dainty, like the
dress of one of Velasquez's laced and purfled
huntsmen. One mav take from them a lesson
in the entrancing power of Utile, and the
manner in which all essential impressions are
best conveyed in tiny quantities.

Something similar applies to the abbey itself.
It takes meaning and worthiness from the forest
surrounding it, the remoteness of the place and
the rigours of its winters.

One day we went over the monastery, since
many years turned into a school of forestry : the
great corridors with former cells opening on to it,
the refectory with the forestry pupils' supper
spread ; the monastic kitchen, and all the former
conventual rooms, with the lads' fencing and
gymnastic apparatus, the chemical laboratory
and collections of various kinds of wood, of forest
plants and animals, the abbey library now lilled,
under the portraits of Abbots and V^encrables,
with scientific books and periodicals, and, along-
side the library, the little rooms where the boys
play at chess and smoke in the snowy autumn and
spring evenings. But fitting in even more with

my dreams of a world on the model of M.

u.

178 VALLOMBROSA

Besnard's frescoes of the Ecole de Pharmacie,
were the vistas of the abbot's apartments with
women going to and fro, and children rmming
about and playing. A great monastery, still
with a bit of mediaeval fortress about it, turned
into a place of useful learning, learning not of
humanities, but of natural history, and inhabited
by studious men and boys, and by women and
children — the chief professor's nine little ones
playing with dogs and cats and apprentice
foresters at the abbey gate, and rolling in the
grass by the fish-pond — such a place answers to
the various claims a decent creature would make
upon life, on the past and the present, the grace
and dignity of the centuries and their purified
remembrance among the work and the love and
the hope of to-day. And all round, holding it
quiet and safe, the great forests of beech and fir,
the distant pale pastures and blue rocky crests.
Does the reality fall short of my imagining ?
Are the forests perhaps less well tended, the
professors perhaps less profound, the pupils
perhaps less fervid, the whole partaking some-
what of the perfunctoriness of most human
beings ? Possibly. But whatever the prose of
the place may be, its poetry, its possibilities under
fortunate circumstances, its suggestion to anyone
with a spark of humanity and imagination, is of
the best, most satisfying kind. The poetry, as
I said, of Besnard's great paintings, and of a few
rare biographies of scientific men, like Madame
Duclaux's incomparable life of her husband.

VALLOMBROSA 179

Another place concentrates for one the other
kind of poetry of which Vallombrosa is full. It is
called after the Holy Beechtree. The great mossy-
tree slants its branches, poises the tent of its
leaves over a little terrace, benches, and steps,
weather black, velvety-green with moss, strewn
with brown beech leaves as if brocaded and car-
peted for some sylvan procession. Alongside is a
tiny chapel, almost a temple, a porch supported
on slim Ionic columns. The place is almost
within hail of the monastery windows, but so en-
closed, so isolated, as to give a sense of infinite
woodland remoteness. Here the mountain guide
Storno, looking like nothing so much as an old
half-plucked hawk on a barn door, retailed his
experience of the former monks, given over to
pomp and to sloth, and keeping vigil only when
they stole out, even across the winter snow, to the
girls in the village in the valley.

"And here," he said, pointing to the Holy
Beech, "they would come for afternoon
picnic."

Whatever degree of truth in the old gentle-
man's gossip, I prefer to think of the Holy Beech
in less ecclesiastical connexion, and of Saint John
Gualberto not as the spiritual father (in stucco
clouds) of such a questionable brotherhood, but
rather as some kind of woodland deity of far-ofl'
pagan days, whose bearded face laughs here and
there on lichened cross or column in the forest,
whose pastoral staff and lion-handled sword, on
boundary stone or tabernacle, should be the

180 VALLOMBROSA

symbol not of a sentimental mediaeval legend, but
of some ancient earth-worship.

Nay, the real sylvan god is this — the great
beech-tree itself, spreading over its own moss-
covered altar-steps. And even those carnal and
hypocritical monks of old Storno's tales must
have been subdued by the solemnity of the great
woods and the mystery of their sounds, by the
armies of pennoned firs, the processions of
white-armed beeches in the dusk and the mist,
by the hum of unseen bees, and the gathering
rustle of the scarce-stirring foliage, into some
sort of annual purification of their poor little
souls in this ancient outdoor shrine.

That little chapel or temple alongside of the
Holy Beech is, of course, scrawled over with the
colossal signature, the loutish jests, of genera-
tions of trippers. But in front of the empty altar
the wind has gently strewed a little drift of beech
leaves, brown and fragrant.

Such are the things which Vallombrosa has
meant to me now I have got to know it. And
how differently I shall feel, with what harmonics,
or harmonies rather, of memories and fancies,
whenever in future I shall see the great hill at
the turn of my lane, with the autumn sunset
flushing it violet, or the winter snow deepening
by contrast its storm-blue.

XXVII

PETRARCH'S HOUSE AT
ARQUA

I WISH I could gather together my wits and
words to catch and liold the memory of that after-
noon at Arqua. Gather together ; the expression
keeps recurring to me, for the day was one which
itself held things close and brooding in its veiled
sunniness, and gave to present scenes the nar-
rowed and insulated serenity of things long past
and much remembered.

After that precocious winter of snowy Alps
and muddy towns which first met me in Italy,
the returning heat has sucked fogs from all this
soaking green country of reclaimed swamp and
never-ending canal, making the pavement of
Padua wet till noon, and the great loggias of its
public palace clammy as with historical horrors ;
and wrapping the fields at sunset, and our souls
also, with a dank cere-cloth of cold vapours.
Never has Italy been less Italy for me. But
that day at Arqua — (it was only the day before
yesterday, though I cannot believe it, writing in
the train on tlicsc sunl)urnt, crumbling, Apcnninc
slopes)— that day at Arqui, t lie mists were merely
benignant, enclosing us, as the motor rushed

181

182 PETRARCH'S HOUSE AT ARQUA

along, in a succession of little peaceful worlds
of sunny gentleness.

First — for I see it as one of those globes,
copied perhaps from those of crystal-gazers, such
as are held by painted symbolical angels, the
days of Creation, the Earth and its Kingdoms
curdling in little round pictures on their dimmed
circular brightness — first, the cupolas and mina-
rets, so amazingly Eastern, of Padua, left behind
among yellowing plane-trees. Then, the first
Euganean cones coming in sight, pale blue,
inconceivably bodiless, bubbles of luminous
smoke on the faint plain.

Later, the canal of the Brenta, its slow jade
water flowered at the brink with russet sedge and
lilac Michaelmas daisy ; some village recalling,
with its old Venetian inns, the days when people
went leisurely from Venice to Ferrara and
Bologna by barge, such little details from the past
adding themselves quite naturally to this present,
already so like a remembered thing in its dim
aloofness. Presently the sharp castled crag of
Monselice arose out of the sunny October veil,
and we crossed that Brenta canal, of which it is
pleasant to think that its waters have rushed blue
on the shingle of the Alpine portals, turned the
floating mills at Bassano, and are going to die
in the black-and-gold tulip splendours of sunset
on the Lagoon. The road now made straight
into the hills, which hitherto we had only skirted,
between willowed meadows and symmetrical
festoons of vines, laden even this grapeless year,

PETRARCirS HOUSE AT ARQT'A 183

and of a uniform lovely rose colour, like some still
undiscovered alloy of copper and silver. Into
the Hills, the Eugancans ; and into the very lap
of their southernmost cones.

I have never seen lovelier country than about
Arqua ; and, what is more, of that particular
southern loveliness which, even in Italy —
perhaps most in Italy — has for me the fascina-
tion of something rare and i)rccious — I would say
classic, Odysscan, Ilcspcridean ; and all on the
brink of this damp, green plain, sea-swamp
reclaimed, and river alluvium, of Venctia ;
indeed, in the midst of it, for the Euganean Hills
seem to have bubbled out of it, leaving their
valleys flat. Those little volcanic hills hold
Arqua close on all sides, save to the south, where
the damp delta of the Po is, so to speak, warded
off by the last Euganean, a perfect cone, distant
and silvery in the autumn sunshine ; the whole
of this unlikely bit of Mediterranean country
hidden, tucked away, isolated from the northern
lands all round. The slopes round Petrarch's
village are spaliered with luxuriant yellowing
vines, and tufted with cypress ; the jujube tree
grows in the vineyards, and the scarlet pome-
granate, and there arc plentiful olives, larger
and freer-growing than our Florentine ones, with
almost Circck girth of split trunk and ample
hang of boughs. One expects wild lavender and
myrtle, and I am not sure I should not find it
could I wander, without thought of Petrarch or
motor-car, freely among the rocks. The rocks !

184 PETRARCH'S HOUSE AT ARQUA

That is perhaps the southernmost thing at
Arqua. For there is a kind of rock, white and
friable, as if from steady generous heat, tufted
with aromatic herbs and sunburnt grass, which,
to anyone knowing the South's especial emotion
— the emotion one gets at Portofino and Alassio,
in the Maremma and Greece, and, most of all,
from Provence (I am thinking of the Abbey of
Montmajour, near Aries') means the South far
more than any detail of vegetation.

Petrarch's house is the last of the village.
It stands in a little garden, which has kept its
box-hedges under the vines and tall bay- trees;
a small two-storeyed house, with such an outer
stairs and porch as Italian farmhouses have, and
the mediaeval houses also of Viterbo. It has
Gothic windows like those you see in every street
at Venice, but here they strike the imagination,
and almost catch one's breath, for they mean
that this house is not merely on the same site as
the poet's, but that the man Petrarch actually
lived in it just as it is.

Lived here. One may say lives here. Do
not misunderstand me ; I fear that while
recognizing (and the huge visitors' books with
Affieri's, Goethe's, Byron's, Shelley's testimonials
force one to recognize) the extraordinary im-
portance which Petrarch has had both for lovers
and patriots in days gone by, I fear that as regards
myself Petrarch is just among the most satis-
factorily dead among the immortals. When I
say " lives here," I mean — what do I mean ? for

PETRARCH'S HOUSE AT ARQUA 185

it is a feeling, not an idea. . . . Well, I mean that
the house, despite the collections of manuscripts
and the portraits and inscriptions and faded
laurel wreaths, looks like the house of any
scholarly Italian priest ; and Petrarch, the
Italian scholarly priest — (I fancy him a retired
Rarnabite or Oratorian bringing with him his
books and studious habits) — might be living
there now, trimming those box-hedges and
l)runing those vines — in fact, keeping and
explaining the relics of another Petrarch, the
fabulous laurelled poet whose verses are illus-
trated in quaint, bad Giorgioncsque frescoes all
round the ceilings. Up there, for instance, in that
familiar Venetian landscape of blue hills and
emerald-green valley and distant white steeples,
behold Madonna Laura wandering in crimped
yellow hair and white brocade, in company with
every possible allegorical goddess, and an
assortment of pleasant mythological creatures,
dryads, fauns, winged horses, and dying swans.
And in the next compartments Messer Francesco,
gowned and hooded, with Muses leading him
through ceremonious and lyric meetings, until
(on the opposite wall) poor Laura, stung like
Eurydice by a (metaphorical) snake, lays herself
prone, a white brocaded doll, in the soft grass
(rerbcttc molli) by the unfailing " chiare acque."
And further on still the Poet, disconsolate, grows
into a bay-tree, finger-tips putting out green
leafy gloves, and a branch of laurel shooting out
of the neck of his purple canon's gown.

186 PETRARCH'S HOUSE AT ARQUA

The house contains a more unlikely, and, to my
thinking, more convincing record of Petrarch's
fidelity in affection ; in a glazed-in niche over
one of the doors a most mysterious figure, some-
thing between a naked wax-doll and a ferret.
A Latin poem on a marble slab explains it to be
Petrarch's Cat ; his chief love, Laura coming
in, quite explicitly, only for the second place in
his affections. Perhaps — who shall decide ? —
those verses may contain a grain of truth, for
there must be more trouble and less glory in
embalming a cat than in enshrining oneself with
one's lady in a volume of verse. But then, as
before confessed, I feel that the poetry-reading
lovers of bygone days must really have been
most madly in love to get emotion out of
Petrarch's verse, whereas the Vita Nuova on
the one side, and Shakespeare's sonnets on the
other, seem to record and forestall all the finest
joys and griefs of passion.

But, unappreciative as I am, I shall love
Petrarch henceforward for the sake of his
surroundings. Only the greatest possible dear,
let alone a great philosopher and poet, could
have lived in that house and in that place : an
exquisite young goat was tethered in the long
grass under his windows, and flocks of turkeys,
pure cobalt with offended majesty, strutted
outside his door, no ordinary farm property,
but, as the Germans say, " Wonder Beasts "
descended from embroideries and zodiacs to do
the Poet honour. By the time we had got to his

PETRARCH'S HOUSE AT ARQUA 187

tomb I was aware that I should probably take
to reading Petrarch, and find that he was really
quite as great as Goethe and Alfieri and Foscolo
and Byron and Sliclley, and all those other
multitudinous signatories of the registers we
had turned over, had ever said he was. Any
way, I was seerctly moved.

The sarcophagus of red Veronese marble,
evidently copied from Antenor's tomb at Padua,
stands on the terrace of the white village church.
The bells were ringing in the funnel-capped
Venetian steeple, and Our Lady of the Rosary,
in gala of tarnished brocade and paper flowers,
was waiting on her palanquin, ready for
to-morrow's procession, and quite superior to
the poet resting at her threshold.

But as we walked down the steep stony street
of Arqua there arose, summing up all that im-
pression of southern simplicity and grace, the
smell, the sweetest surely of nature's many kinds
of incense, of burning olive-twigs.

At Este, beyond those last Euganean cones, we
had our tea among the scabious and mint, the
many butterflies, of the grass slope within the
castle walls, above which rises a fringe of pines
and cypresses, the last trace of South above the
soaked Fcrrarese plain. And here the ])Ower of
poetry triumphed over the genius of localities in
my heart : this dull little Venetian market town
of Este is the place where Shelley wrote his
" Euganean Hills/' t lie second act of Prometlieus,
I think, and that little rhyme " O Mary dear, if

188 PETRARCH'S HOUSE AT ARQUA

thou wert here," whose refrain "the Castle
Echoes answer here " went on in my head for
hours, scanned by the steady breathings of the
motor.

We rushed along interminable avenues of
planes to Montagnana, a garrison town which,
from outside, looks what it did in Petrarch's day,
under the Scaligers or Marquises of Este or of
Mantua. The last Euganean had long since
vanished into greyness. The usual icy mists
were rising, in a sky of blotted-out sunset, from
the wet grass under the towers and walls and
drawbridges of that ghostly fortress. And bells
rang, rang, rang in every village ; and in night
and fog we awoke, so to speak, from the sunny
dream of Arqua.

XXVIII
THE TREASURE OF VEXZONE

We jumped out of the Vienna express at sunrise,
and, chartering a broken-do'svn gig at the first
roadside station after the Custom House, ^vc
entered Italj' by the great rocky portals where
the TagHamento swirls into the plain of Vcnetia.

For in that mountain gateway, under the
sawlike peaks (which seem those of the Virgin
of the Rockb) of the Carnic Alps, and between
the rapid stream of purest, pale periwinkle
water, and a shining white river of dry glacier
stones arrested on the hillside, lies the little town
of Venzone, forgotten by history alike and by
progress, but not to be forgotten by the Senti-
mental Traveller.

I had been to Venzone, n\ hose existence I had
not previously suspected, on a burning August
day some years ago, and had brought back an
impression, above all, of the strange transparency
as of jasper or amethyst, of the bare rocks in the
fierce mid-day heat, their sharp edges luminous
against the blazing sky. And under this mar-
vellous pallor made of light, I remembered the
little piazza of Venzone, on one side the Palazzo
Pubblico, colonnaded and loggia'd and slair-

Ih'J

190 THE TREASURE OF VENZONE

cased, with its lion of St. Mark ; on the other
a charming Venetian Gothic house with a
dishevelled vine, and in the middle, by a
Veronese funnel-shaped belfry, orange with age
and lichen, a fountain already German in shape,
trough, column, and spirts, lacking only the
man-at-arms or mermaid belonging to Teutonic
countries. I remembered also the church of
smooth grey stone, delicate lilac in that light,
lifting its high belfry, and the saints and angels
of its gables, into that fiery blue sky, against that
crystalline glittering amethyst of mountains.
It stood, I remember, with the delightful quality
of perfect unity and utter solitude, at the end
of the village-like little town, close against the
vine-covered city walls, with only grass and
orchard round. And its interior, bare and
empty, with half- effaced frescoes and trodden-
out escutheons, had the sanctity given by age
and desolation, by silence and the sweetness of
fresh hay and sunburnt vines entering warm
through the open doors.

But, above all, what I had brought back and
cherished from that first visit to Venzone and
its church was the recollection of a Treasure.
That is not quite what I mean, and what I mean
is difficult to put into words. For, of course, I
had seen far finer church treasures all the world
over — crucifixes and ostensoria like Gothic
spires, or buttressed chapels shaped of gold and
silver ; reliquaries like Byzantine basilicas,
pillareted or cupola'd, translated into fretted

THE TREASURE OF AT:NZ0NE 191

metal and deep blue enamel ; missal-covers of
onyx and jasper, set with uncut topaz and car-
buncle, or carved in ivory with stola'd figures
like Grecian muses ; crowns and circlets for
Kings and Queens of the Nibelungenlied, or the
Chanson dc Roland ; ivory combs and horns
and skewers ; and, what has ever touched my
imagination more than all the rest, barbaric
crosses into whose rudely hammered and jointed
gold plates are set cameos of crowned Caesars,
and root-of-emerald carved with Bacchanals. . . .
What was tiic poor little treasure of Venzone
compared with all I had seen of such things at
Monza and Aix-la-Chapellc, at Cologne or
Troyes ? Still less compared with the collections
of the Retrospective at the Paris Exhibition ?
And mentioning the Paris Exhibition brings
home and explains what it was I remembered
at Venzone, and what I returned to Venzone to
enjoy once more. For in those glass and iron
domes of the Exhibition, among those labelled
glass cases, a wish had gradually arisen in my
mind, the longing to see and feel this sacred
art of the past, additionally sanctified by the
sense of time and remoteness ; a dream, for it
took a real name and imaginary shape, of the
Treasure of Conques, profaned in that worldly
show, back in its original i>lace, in the forlorn
weather-beaten church which I ])ictured to
myself among the arid slopes of the Ccvennes.
Well, as sonulinics happens in similar cases,
that longing, that year-long drenm. had suddenly

192 THE TREASURE OF VENZONE

been realized where I expected it least, when I
had come upon Venzone, its Church and its
Treasure.

Passing through the sacristy we groped into
a windowless closet, pitch-dark and stacked
with discarded church furniture, banners, and
tall gilt lanterns. By the light of a candle an
iron door was discovered, a safe built into the
church wall. There was endless fumbling with
wrong keys, turning of locks and counter-locks,
one within the other ; the bolts and bars w^re
slowly drawn, and, after muttered invocations
and thumpings and tuggings, the great iron-
studded door at last opened, and the light of
the wax stump fell on the closely packed efful-
gence filling that deep black hiding-place.
Slowly and with difficulty the many-antlered
crucifixes and ostensoria were disentangled from
each other, and handed out, glittering in the
smoky light, for us to hold and wonder at.
Then, one by one, the embossed paxes and
paterae, the ivory pyx, the tulip- shaped chalices,
and the silver-gilt reliquary in the shape of a
Venetian galley with oars and rigging of gold.
The air in that long-closed place was icy and
gravelike, tasting of incense and old, old wood-
work, and funeral torches snuffed out long ago.
One's very senses were filled with the forgotten,
venerable past. The thought of that unknown
Church of Conques on its imaginary hillside,
the poignancy of that absurd, long- cherished
wish of mine, rang clear and harmonious through

THE TREASURE OF \^NZOXE 193

my present mood, mueh as the sound of the bells
high above me interrupted the midday stillness
and mingled with it. For the seeond time
Vcnzonc had realized my dream of seeing a
church treasure in its right surroundings.

We lingered a little in the empty church,
spelling out the inscriptions round the coats-of-
arms on the flagstones and the great crested and
feathered helmets of German pattern. Then
we clambered up a worm-eaten staircase, and
on to the platform of the belfry, dripped over as
with pitch with the greasing of the bells. We
stood for a long time under the big green bells,
their long clappers close to our heads, and looked
idly into the present and the past. Close
below us the Madonna and Angels on the
pinnacles profiled their weather-worn draperies,
and jagged metal wings no longer against the
blue of the sky, but on the green of the grass
and the vines. And round the delicate edge
and angles of the church gables, pale-grey stone,
with a faint rosiness of lichens, lay the little
town, with its crown of orchards among the
battlements, and its Venetian chimneys and
Veronese belfries. The wide, white bed of the
Tagliamcnto, the wider white moraines encircled
it, and those high, bare, crystalline crags, the
portals of the Alps opened in front, showing a
horizon of bluish misty plain ; the great
Dolomitic ranges closed it all in bchmd : a
wonderfully remote little place, though the
express from Vienna to Venice rushes past

194 THE TREASURE OF VENZONE

three times a day, unconscious of it and its
Treasure.

On the occasion of my first visit, the sacristan
who showed the Treasure (he would have
preferred to show us half a dozen queer modern
corpses, mummified by some freak of the soil,
and of which he was the official guardian), while
fumbling at the locks and snuffing his taper- end,
entertained us about the past and the present of
Venzone. The town, commanding that gate
into Italy, had been fought for during centuries
by the Dukes of Carinthia and the Patriarchs
of Aquileia ; it had taken tolls and secured
charters from the wandering Emperors and the
Republic of St. Mark ; it had been a place of
merchants, half Venetian and half German, who
built the little balconied palaces, and the triple
belt of walls, and the Palazzo Pubblico, and the
fountain, and this church. And the Treasure
had been made by native goldsmiths, or given
to the town by foreign princes and prelates.
While now it was inhabited only by a handful
of vintners and peasants cultivating the lowest
slopes of the mountain ; the families to whom
all the land belonged, and who rented it to these
poor people, living at Gemona and at Udine, never
coming near the place themselves. ' ' No one comes
to Venzone," said the sacristan, and vainly set
forth the attractions of those mummies ; see, he
had caused an itinerant photographer to make a
picture-postcard representing a row of them, but
even that had not sufficed to attract travellers,

THE TREASURE OF VENZONE 195

The light of the candle- stump flickered once
more among the gold and silver and enamels
of that deep black hole. The iron door closed
again; locks, double locks, and bolts and bars and
all ; and this time for heaven knows how long !
I had a feeling that it had never been opened
during the four or five years (and so much else
seemed to have opened and closed in that time !)
which separated my two visits to Venzonc.
The sacristan recognized me at once ; the inn-
keeper, the owner of the broken-down gig, the
tobacconist, the cobbler, and the sergeant of
gendarmerie — all the notables, let alone the
street children. " No one ever comes to Venzonc
nowadays," they all said. And if any should
come in the future, I believe that this third
traveller, this third seeker after the Treasure
of Venzonc, will again be myself.

XXIX

THE LAGOON OF COMACCHIO

That was an extraordinary impression when
we came upon the ramparts of Fcrrara. Other
walls hide the shrunken cities behind them as
utterly as these ; the walls of Rome, for instance,
seeming to enclose only empty, forsaken spaces.
But these ramparts of Ferrara not only let you
guess at no roofs or belfries behind their star-
shaped bastions and lines of yellowing trees ;
they separate that invisible and unthinkable
town from an uninhabited emptiness : not a
suburb, not a farm ; only, for miles and miles,
the great fields of grass, the endless rows of
poplars, the dykes and turbid canals of the
great river Po dwindling and dying in its
delta.

We came upon those ramparts very fitly after
a day in one of the emptiest regions I have ever
seen, althou^di it is one of the richest of all
Italy, and the scene, at this very moment, of
Socialist agitation and great rural strikes. Jkit
the peasants are gathered together in the little
towns and big villages, each with its " Casa del
Popolo " and Socialist club ; also at the tram-
way stations, whither teams of white bullocks

I'JT

198 THE LAGOON OF COMACCHIO

carry hemp and beetroot on those great carved
carts, like sixteenth-century gun-waggons. And,
except where the ploughing has begun with
yoke upon yoke, the immense fields and meadows
are empty, empty ; far emptier than the Roman
Campagna.

Hurrying along in my Bolognese friends'
great motor, we began to notice — (as ploughed
fields were exchanged more and more for
grass and the orange rice- stubble, and as the
poplar rows yielded to dykes and hedges of
tamarisks) — we began, I said, to notice flights
no longer of starlings, but of wild duck, and here
and there a swarm of white gulls. Then, as the
motor rushed onward, a strip of metallic grey
came into sight, and widened into an immense
circle of shallow sea, barely bounded by faint,
faint lines of coast and mountains. And a few
minutes later we were speeding between swamps
of faded sea-lavender and crimson sea-sorrel,
and then along a dyke, miles long, with the leaden
waters on either side, in front, all round, to
where we found the towers of Comacchio, a
microscopic Venice, with canals and staircased
bridges and wharves, hiding its malaria behind
flower-like tints of plaster, oleander-pink, carna-
tion, pale orange and lemon and lilac, and inde-
scribable silver and green of sea- weathering, as
of a frayed brocade. A tiny Venice, much further
from the mainland, this poor little Comacchio,
in a lagoon twice as extensive, closed in by
dunes and oak-scrub, and through which only

TIIE LAGOON OF CO:\LVCCniO 199

one narrow channel, with its yellow Chiozzot
boats, leads to the open sea, raging with muddy
tide against those sandbanks. One asks oneself
why Comacchio should not have become a
Venice, instead of a village of fishermen and
poachers, and have lived off Eastern trade,
instead of catching eels in wattles and salting
them from the neighbouring salt- sheds. The
answer, I take it, is the same as to the question
why not a boat is to be seen ; not a sail on those
miles of inland sea. The answer, namely, that
while the smaller Alpine rivers, Brenta, Sile,
Piave, and their comrades, traverse the salt
lagoon with their swift currents, and make the
canals of Giudecca, Grand Canal, and all the
lesser Venetian waterways, let alone those
between the outlying islands ; the various
mouths of the Po, languid and silted, have
merely heaped up mud round this southernmost
lagoon of Comacchio, closing it from the Adriatic
and turning it, more and more, into swamp and
shallow pool, with no deep channels across it,
leaving it to slimy fish and malarious peasants,
a shallow lake languidly polluting even that
raging sea with the muddy waters of its one
little outlet.

When we had turned our backs on the Adriatic
at Magnavacca and were rushing along the miles
of dykes connecting it with Comacchio, in mid-
lagoon, and along the other miles, even longer,
between Comacchio and the mainland, the misty
skies gradually broke up and took colour, storm-

200 THE LAGOON OF COMACCHIO

black and storm-gleamings ; and a line of
distant blue Apennine crests appeared south-
ward, where the Ravenna pinewoods march with
the swamps of Comacchio. And out of the
shallow slate-blue waters, against those stormy
slate-blue skies, there flashed out, like the
lagoon-gulls, a flock of white distant towns,
towers and steeples, Codigoro and Pomposa,
which one's fancy filled with damp-stained
basilicas slipping slowly into the marshes, their
frescoes peeling off, their mosaics falling out, the
horned sarcophagi around them sinking into the
rank grass ; places peopled less with their real
poor fisherfoik than with the white-stoled
martyrs and brocaded virgins, with kohl'd eyes
like bayaderes, of Ravenna and Torcello.

It was after this day at Comacchio that,
hurrying back through those empty rice- swamps
and pastures, we came upon the ramparts of
Ferrara : their star-shaped bastions and avenues
of planes, and their willow-grown moats separ-
ating this uninhabited country from the
depopulated, invisible city. Passing under the
gateway, those wide, straight streets of magnifi-
cent palaces and ample gardens, that whole,
great town suddenly put to sleep at^^the height
of its triumphant growth, is the only thing one
could expect in that fertile, forlorn country and
behind those mysterious ramparts.

XXX

WINTER DAYS AT RAVENNA

That Byzantine Bishop's throne in the church
of St. ApolHnaris has always charmed me as
something strangely Greek. And now, returning
to Ravenna after having been in Greece, it
touches me still more with the remembrance of
those theatre-seats among the dry grass of the
Acropolis. Similarly to-day, looking over the
Adriatic beyond these Ravenna marshes, the
wintry sunny sea beyond the white pier-heads
suddenly took a classic poignancy of charm :
somewhere, beyond the sun's long trails of
silver on the hazy water, somewhere out there,
south-east, is Greece !

That first afternoon I bicycled the few miles
which now separate Ravenna from the sea.
After frost in the night (and thick snow on the
Apennines) it was cold, but radiant ; all things
made of sunny aetherial blue. Just where the
russet of the marsh begins, with the fringe of
umbrella-pines, there advanced towards me up
the canal a two-master, all sail struck, towed by
three yoke of oxen, its beetle-green hull reflected
in the blue water. The long white road was
solitary ; only here and there a man with a dog

2U1

202 WINTER DAYS AT RAVENNA

and a gun ; and where a distant pond drained
through the marsh into the canal some men
were watching eel-pots, like sunken boats, under
a bridge. Also, when I got to that narrow
belt of pines across the marsh, a man was
hunting for truffles, following the scent of a
shaggy black dog, and armed with a steel spud
which flashed in the winter sunshine.

I walked the whole length of the stone canal-
wharf, to where the wooden pier begins. The
Adriatic was pure blue, faintly heaving beyond
the narrow sands where the gulls fluttered and
people were fishing for crabs. A big boat was
going out, its great yellow sail bellied. I was
sitting on the pier. I became aware that this
sea outside Ravenna now means Greece for me.
The Parian marble of the altar in San Vitale was
brought across it, and the marble of the Bishop's
throne of St. Apollinaris, shaped like that of the
high priest of Dionysus.

How our imaginative emotions, our glimpses
of the Genius Loci, multiply themselves like
views in opposite mirrors ! At Delphi and
Olympia, two years ago, the bits of Byzantine
carving among those classic ruins touched me
more than anything else. And now, looking at
the marble lattice-work, the slender crosses,
outlined in green lichen, of these Ravenna
churches, I see between them the amethyst
rocks of Parnassus, the feathery maritime pines
of Kronos' hill by the streams of Alpheus ; and
looking across the Adriatic this day of winter

WINTER DAYS AT RAA'EXNA 203

sunshine, I feel Greece filling my soul like the
aromatic scent of its sun-dried herbs.

It was not only Greece (for has such a Greece
ever existed down there beyond the seas ?),
but Elysium, in the pinewood of Classe those
days of winter sun. We walked across its
width, about a couple of miles beyond the forlorn
church, along a canal reflecting the tall umbrella-
pines. And then skirted along in the direction
of Ccrvia, with its name telling of the stags
whom Boccaccio's Spectre Hounds once hunted.

After the night's frost the ground was moist,
yet hard, of vividcst green moss tufted with
thyme silvery and fragrant from the summer's
singeing. Wc walked among the young pines,
low and brilliant green, with the velvety domes
of the taller trees patterning the sky inland.
On the other side was the purply brown of the
marsh, with wide ponds and streams reflecting
the sky, and reeds where the grey cattle drank.
In the distance was a ruined martello tower ;
and beyond, on the horizon, yellow sails revealed
the unseen sea.

But this Adriatic seaboard has wintry trans-
formations. We drove, early one afternoon,
towards Comacchio and that village of Sant'
Alberto near which Garibaldi lurked in flight
after his poor Annita's death. Smishinc ; the
ponds and streams spilt over that marshland,
a diaphanous blue ; and the fields of purply
brown sedge, the russet haystacks and fringes of
sere rice-straw and the distant belts of woods,

204 WINTER DAYS AT RAVENNA

exquisite, like the veinings of a tea-rose against
the sunny sky and azure mists.

At Sant' Alberto, a squalid little town (mean
modern cottages gathered against one or two
gaunt buttressed palaces), we found great ex-
citement over an Anarchist's funeral (people in
Romagna call themselves Anarchists, as they
might Monarchists or Republicans !), with red
banners and crape and municipal bands ; while
the despised priest looked on from his church-
step. We walked to the end of that little flat
place, and climbed upon the embankment of
one of the great canals of the Po. Across the
dykes we could see the salt lagoon of Comacchio
faintly bounded by sandbanks and poplars, and
distant church steeples, white gulls flying over
them ; an exquisite blue sunny vision.

But we had barely got half a mile on our way
back to Ravenna when, with an icy breath, a wisp,
a veil of fog suddenly drove towards us, making
the sky supernaturally blue behind the poplar-
belts ; and, in a few seconds, settling upon the
marsh. Then came a struggle between that
streaming icy mist and the afternoon sun, at
first diminished to a mere bright wafer, then
bursting through with unearthly glare, turning
those marshy ponds into quicksilver, the waters
among the reeds and the flowering sedge into the
silver embroideries of witches.

We drove quickly along, through the icy
drenching fog which blotted the whole country ;
until, suddenly, its veil was left behind, and the

WINTER DAYS AT RAVENNA 205

belfries and towers of Ravenna appeared against
a fair frosty sky.

My last expedition, these winter days at
Ravenna, was to sec once more the Giottesque
frescoes in that lonely church of Santa IMaria
in Porto, whose Byzantine belfry is said to have
replaced the harbour lighthouse of the days
when Roman galleys rode at anchor where now
stretch reclaimed fields and rice-marsh.

The priest, a hunchback, was standing in the
fitful sunshine by the church-door, and offered
to do us the honours of that forlorn place.
Having shown us over that extraordinarily
venerable and touching little church, Byzantine
but ended off in Gothic, ogival yet with the
squatness of the dark ages, and all corroded (even
its poor little tinsel Madonna) by damp and
incalculable neglect, he took us to see his mother
and sister. The presbytery was across a bit of
former cloister given over to poultry, a splendid
pure white turkey figuring as fairy villain in
that poor place, and retreating wrathfully into
the kitchen. Such a poor, poor little house,
stocked with broken furniture, it seemed, and
rags.

But there was nothing pathetic, rather an odd
humorous heroism about the inhabitants. You
should have 'seen the splendid old peasant-
mother and the stalwart sister, sitting opposite
the priest, telling us stories of his dealings with
his ill-conditioned Socialist parishioners, as if
he had been a mailed and vizored mediaval

206 WINTER DAYS AT RAVENNA

warrior-prelate, rather than a poor little de-
formed creature, worn and parched by fever,
malarial anaemia, and poverty, presiding over a
dozen farms scattered between Ravenna and the
sea, in this recently reclaimed marsh below the
neighbom'ing river level. He had intelligent
dark eyes, and a resolute, laughing mouth.
Indeed, he and his womankind contrived to get
a lot of good-humoured — and, what was stranger
— dignified laughter out of all their misfortunes :
the threats of the self-styled " Anarchists," who
never came to church except when some head
of cattle was ill ; the stealing of the parochial
hay and cheating over the parochial faggots ;
the neglect of the authorities — nay, even the
fever and rheumatism. Those three, mother
and brother and sister, were somehow folk apart,
and in their heroic cheerfulness superior to
evildoers and elements. The mother had brought
vin sauto and glasses into the priest's study, and
we sat for a long time between the piles of
mouldering books and the sewing-machine,
listening to the stories of the marsh and its god-
less farmers. What was delightful was the total
absence of any hypocritical mansuetude towards
the parishioners : if they preferred to die like
beasts, averred the priest's sister, let them please

themselves, " padroni loro "

And, by some inexplicable accident in tlie
history of that poor family's scant furniture,
the study where these plucky and racy people
entertained us was presided over not only (as

WINTER DAYS AT RAVENNA 207

usual) by the crucifix on the priest's desk, but,
on a shelf above the bungcd-up fireplace, by a
little Buddha of jade. Did the two spirits of
gentleness unite to infuse a double dose of self-
respecting humorous courage into these, the
owners of their cfTigies ?

When we had thanked and said good-bye we
passed again through the church ; there was
something inconceivably droll in all those
Giottcsque lords and ladies and saints and angels
in the fresh blue and pink of the newly un-
covered fresco. i\Icdia?val persons of quality, all
beautiful and beautifully dressed and beautifully
mannered, smiling and languishing with their
pink and white faces and almond eyes, in the
last gleam of winter sunlight. Francesca da
Rimini, it is said, is one of them, with an em-
broidered hem and a green garland. And
alongside is that priest's family, struggling
cheerfully with rags, and fever, and godless
Socialists, in the tumble-down house below the
level of the river-bed.

XXXI

THE BLIND SINGER OF
SATURNIA

I HAD been suffering, all these clays of return
to the Marcmma, from the lack of that human
clement which should bring to a focus and
personify the impressions of these lush pastures
and aromatic hillsides and endless woods, where
nightingales sing in the pink oak-leaf and
blossoming may, and where the great black-
faced cattle browse among the overblown
asphodels.

Why was there no ruined tower for Dante's
Pia — " Siena mi fe, disfecemi Marcmma " — by
the little lake deep in the forests, from whose
rushes rose the cry of the bittern, and over
which circled great hawks in the blue emptiness ?

The people who once lived here are too remote ;
their memory has crumbled to nothing, like the
handfuls of bones and the scraps of bronze in
their long-rifled tumuli among the woods. The
Middle Ages have left only names, and some-
times nameless coats-of-arms on the battle-
mented walls of the villages. We do not even
know the real name of that ruined abbey over-
grown with acanthus nor the name of the samt

209 o

210 THE BLIND SINGER OF SATURNIA

to whom its finely set ashlars and capitals carved
with boars' heads were once dedicated.

The dead, in the Maremma, are too dead.
And the living are not sufficiently alive : those
poor, fever-dulled people of the black mediaeval
towns, littering even their church-steps with
ordure, and those shepherds who thrust hundreds
of sheep every evening into the dark wattled
mazes where the few drops of milk are squeezed
out of ewe after ewe, looking like priests of some
earth-worship at their savage primaeval rites.
It is all very unhuman, this solemn and beautiful
South Tuscan seaboard. And the Genius of
Places is, after all, largely the spirit of a region's
inhabitants, present or past.

I was making this reflection yesterday after-
noon while dressing for our last ride through the
myrtle and lentisk thickets, when the Prince's
grand-daughters knocked calling me to come
and hear a blind man who was playing the
accordion for the servants. It proved to be no
accordion at all, but a superior instrument of
the concertina sort. It had cost a hundred
francs, and been subscribed for by the people
of the blind man's native town, a little mediaeval
place which we see inland, impregnable on its
travertine ridge high above the forests. So the
blind musician told us. He was seated in the
whitewashed room where the bailiffs and upper
herdsmen eat, alongside the castle kitchen.
He was seated against the wall on a straw-
bottomed chair, his stout cowhide boots with

THE BLIND SINGER OF SATURNIA 211

yellow clastic sides tucked under the bars, and
hunched up over his instrument : a man of no
definable age, tall and thin, in an old velveteen
shooting-coat and washed-out rose-coloured
shirt. I noticed his figure and clothes first, and
next his extraordinary hands, long and narrow
and bro^^Tl, with claw-like fingers as of an old
paralyzed person, but moving with delicate
nimbleness upon the concertina keys. And I
did so because I instinctively avoided his poor
face, furrowed — washed away, as it were — by
small- pox ; and particularly the dreadful empty
holes where eyes should have been. But as he
bent over his concertina and played a dance
tune with perfect rhythm and a tone as of rustic
pipes, I became aware, almost without looking
(for the knowledge of that ravaged face and
those terrible sockets prevented me), that he had
a beautifully set-on and shaped head, and an
expression, now caressing his instrument, now
uplifted towards us, which was in itself a glance :
a look more tender and more fiery than the rest
of us could muster with all our pairs of seeing
eyes.

The girls, in their rough riding clothes, were
seated on the dining-table, which had been
l)ushed into a corner, and the castle servants
and the Sunday crowd of herdsmen and foresters
and cheese-makers and hedgers and what all,
crowded round the door, and in the passage,
overflowing into the kitchen, with the shuffle
and buzz wliich is the Southern way of being

212 THE BLIND SINGER OF SATURNIA

silent. There was a clear space in front of the
musician, but the upper servants were too fine
to dance, and the other folk far too shy ; until
there suddenly entered a dreadful masquerade
figure, later identified as the house carpenter,
with a sham hump beneath tattered clothes and
a soot- painted face under a battered hat, who
began capering and mouthing in caricature of
the charcoal-burners on the estate. It struck
me that it is a harrowing, though perhaps con-
soling, peculiarity about poor folk, as it doubtless
was about our mediaeval ancestors, thus to get a
horrid humorous pleasure out of their own
squalor and old age and deformity. Be that
as it may, the make-believe charcoal-burner
jumped and gibbered ; so the blind musician,
enlightened by the thumps of his heels and his
stick, struck up the tune of a trescone, to which
the black bogy whirled and leaped with more
grace than expected, forcing out as a partner
one of the many grandmothers usual in an
Italian country house, an old cook-woman who
faced him and spun round until she was incensed
by his attempt to snatch a kiss from her octo-
genarian cheeks. The merriment all seemed
rather ungainly and gruesome. The concertina
meanwhile was playing that old-fashioned dance-
tune something like our hornpipe ; but the
quick-beating rhythm and long quavering
passages, made me think somehow of the
transfigured bagpipe- dances in certain old Italian
violin sonatas, of Corelli and of Porpora.

THE BLIND SINGER OF SATURNIA 213

Then he began playing a waltz ; and the
womankind remaining coy (by this time Donna
Eleonora had also been fetehed downstairs), the
chief hedger, mIio is also our outrider on longer
excursions, coupled with the smith, began to
spin slowly and conscientiously round, with
black hands on broad fustian shoulders. It was
evident that the company did not want to dance,
but merely to listen to the music. It was even
more evident that the blind man was no ordinary
strolling player, but a self-taught virtuoso and
composer of no mean degree, whose brown, claw-
like fingers squeezed out exquisite sylvan sounds
with incomparable masterly brio.

And when, a guitar having been borrowed
from the kitchen and tuned with scrupulous
lengthiness, he preluded with some strange and
beautiful flourishes, and fell to singing what he
called the " Lament of the betrayed mountain
girl," it became, moreover, evident to one at
least of his hearers that he was no ordinary .
well, no ordinary creature of any sort.

But before speaking more fully of the blind
musician I must mention that he was attended
by another half-blind person, whose appearance
for some time diverted my attention from even
his playing. It was just after that dreadful
bogy of a carnival charcoal-burner had begun
his caperings that my eye was caught, among
the peo{)lc by the doorway, by an apparition
which I at first took for some far more success-
ful masquerade : the face of au old woman,

214. THE BLIND SINGER OF SATURNIA

surmounting a black shawl and hooded with a
black kerchief, so pale that I thought it was
whitened with flour ; a face with features so
regular, in a way so beautiful, as to suggest a
tragic mask ; moreover, with the eyes and
temples entirely hidden beneath great black
wire spectacles. Although a moment's reflec-
tion persuaded me that none of the good folk at
the castle could have staged a figure so weird and
so beautiful, it did not at first seem likely that a
real human being could look as much like a
raven and at the same time like a sibyl.

The old lady — for it was an old lady and no
inexplicable tragic mask, coryphaeus of some
tragedy of doom, leader of some mysterious,
terrible chorus of blinded captives — the old lady
presently came out of the doorway, and, seating
herself next to the musician, received his con-
certina when he took the guitar ; and, clasping
it on her knees like a cinerary urn, sat infinitely
silent and motionless through all the rest of his
performance. She was, it turned out, his
"Mamma," the half -blind leader of the blind
along the forest paths and pasture tracks of this
desolate Maremma.

The blind man, meanwhile, had begun singing :
a long, long, sentimental ballad interspersed with
dialogue and cut by lyric intermezzos of the sort
called " rispetto," snatches of vocative beginning
usually with the name of a flower. I had
become accustomed to his being a real musician ;
the splendid rhythm and bagpijDe wildness of

THE BLIND SINGER OF SATURNIA 215

his concertina dance, and that fine tuning and
fanciful prekiding on the borrowed guitar, had
left no doubt possible. And I confess to having
experienced an absurd, painful expectancy of
anti-climax as soon as he prepared to sing. For
of all sickening musical creatures, an Italian
street-singer, with his blatant tremolos and
shameless out-of-tune vocal nudity, is to me far
the most sickening ; better a Paris singing-
beggar, all cut-off words and no notes ; better a
London ballad-singer, with neither notes nor
words whatever, than the warbling tenors and
brazen basses, mouthing foolish sentences, of
the Grand Canal and the hotel windows of
Naples. So I watched for a gap in the group
by the door. But the very first notes reassured
and arrested me. The man's voice was not
great, and he by no means put it all out. But
what there was came with dead-in-tune and
free-throated cleanness, like pure water out of an
ample-mouthed vessel. It was a baritone, or,
rather, a low tenor ; however, one had not the
impression of this or that kind of voice, of high
or low, or, indeed, of voice as voice, but (as is
surely the case with all line singing) of voice as
the audible bodily manifestation of a singing
soul, the incarnation of music in an individual
throat ; and the illusion, which haj)pcncd this
time to coincide with the reality, that the voice
was making the melody, that the singer was
largely improvising for sheer pleasure in his
voice. Similarly, when he paused and looked

216 THE BLIND SINGER OF SATURNIA

round (for he did look with his empty sockets)
the charming harmonies, and odd, amusing
grace-notes seemed to invent themselves under
his hooked fingers on that kitchen guitar. It
was evident, as he sang on and on, interspersing
his pieces with little ironical speeches, that he
was doing so for his own satisfaction, and that
the more he went on the less he could stop ; the
charm of his music and of his whole person being
the deep and varied joy with which he sang.
His face was more radiant than I have ever
seen that of any other performer whatever.
And here I should explain that after a short
while, and so soon as I had got over the terror
of that small-pox ravage and those put-out eyes,
the blind musician's face had fascinated me.
It was clean-shaven, or thereabouts, with short,
loose hair ; and the furrows of the pock-marks
gave it not the horror of disease but something
of the nobility of a weather-worn antique ;
absurd though it sounds, that blind beggar made
me think of such a Grecian head as one sees,
with trickling laurel-boughs above it, in the
hedge of a Roman garden ; and, at the same
time, of Houdon's wonderful bust of Gluck.
But there was something of cunning and violence
also in the crooked mouth and well-set jaw ;
he must have been no easy charge for the tragic
masked " Mamma " to guide through the
mountain villages and wattled shepherds' huts
of this country of herdsmen and outlaws.
A rustic Marsyas, a poet might have said,

THE BLIND SINGER OF SATURNIA 217

stricken blind, as well as flayed by some envious
Apollo, who had given him a Gorgon face, but
which could not be deprived of its radiance and
ironic charm ; a crafty and savage creature
of the woods and pastures, not without kinship
to the beasts, but undoubtedly of a breed that
is divine. Perhaps, without metaphor, of the
race of those wonderful Italians of the seven-
teenth century, Vettori or Stradella or Pistocchi,
who were singers and fiddlers and composers
and actors, the earliest makers of Italian music,
those who gained Italy that fame for nmsical
genius which, when we meet it lingering now-
adays, is apt to bring us up short with astonish-
ment.

" Salve magna parens frugum, Saturniatellus,
magna virum." That verse of Virgil's has been
running in my head all the time of our last
Marennna ride, through the lentisk and myrtle
scrub, and the heather taller than a horse, after
the performance of the blintl beggar in the
servants' dining-room. Probably because one
of his ballads, of which he gave us the printed
sheet of words made by himself, was the lament
of a girl whose lover had been killed by lightning,
arwl the girl was of a village up one of these
valleys, and the name of the village was Solum ia.
Saturnia ! A name to conjure with ! But
emotipn will conjure with lesser names ; and
that blind musician had stirred me very deeply.
There is, of course, something bound to move
one in a poor tramp, blind from the cradle ; and

218 THE BLIND SINGER OF SATURNIA

how much more if he evidently pours out his
whole viewless soul in music of his own making
or remaking ! Besides, I do not mind saying
that there is something which goes straight to
one's primaeval and, so to speak, one's bodily
soul — one's heart, as our fathers rightly called
it — in just such music as his : pleasant, singable
intervals and easy rhythms, poor stuff enough,
no doubt, and which does not call upon the
constructive sense all greater music appeals to,
but catches one — how ? — only the more, carry-
ing along on the stream of a pure human voice
all the random seeds of emotion dispersed into
barrenness by daily life, and the memories and
cravings which we give no heed to, making them
flower in strange floating gardens — Adonis
gardens of a moment — on the flowing surface of
such song.

Saturnia ! the name which Virgil gave to all
Italy. And the name which half a dozen maps
and guide-books, a few score illiterate peasants,
now give to a p)Oor little village of this emptiest
of Italian provinces. Saturnia : some hillside
heap of walls scarcely to be told afar off from the
rock and the rubble ; some trickle of mediaeval
lanes, black as from the burnings of feudal
warfare of Aldobrandeschis and Orsinis ; perhaps
with a brave front of battlements and turrets,
and at the end of its tortuous, oozy street, a
sudden view through a gateway, a cypress taper-
ing against green pastures and blue mountains,
or capes and islands, rocky and azure, like

THE BLIND SINGER OF SATURNIA 219

Aegina and Salamis, above the silver of olives
as huge and hoary as those under ^vhich Plato
once held converse by the Kephissus-bed.
Saturnia. For anything I know, the man may
have been born and bred there ; certainly he
had often climbed up its steep track for fairs
and weddings and saints' davs. That was his
Saturnia, which he sang about. And then there
is Virgil's, magna parens not of crops and herds
only, tlie great black-faced bullocks ploughing
in long teams in the flat river valley, the lieifers
raising their moon-shaped horns above the
aromatic thickets ; but magna parens virum,
mighty parent of those men who were second
only to Hellas ; Saturnia mother, venerable and
glorious mother, of poetry and song. And
surely that blind beggar with his accordion was
her rightful and not disinherited son.

XXXII
THE FALSE VETRALLA

In the Maremma lately, sitting after dinner
drowsy from our long rides in the brushwood, I
had been, not reading, but looking over, dreaming
over, Dennis's " Etruria." It has the charm of
travel when travel was difficult and remote (as
in " Eothen," for instance), and undertaken only
by people with some love of adventure, people
ready to ride and walk, but doing either not for
exercise but for love of strange wonderful places.
And the charm of this book is heightened for me
by the absurd illustrations, elaborate, amateurish,
romantic, such as our grandmothers brought
back in sepia or two-chalks, on tinted paper ;
views resembling nothing that ever did or could
exist, but in whose woolly trees and cardboard
rocks a creature with a heart feels the heart-beats
of that half-hourby the ruin or the bridge snatched
from an impatient " Vetturino " ; and also of
the many half-hours later, when, through long
years, the tissue-papers were turned back from
those pictures of the distant land which the
traveller should never revisit. Dear brown
romantic monstrosities, born of mesalliance of
Keepsakes with Salvator (pronounced Salra/a)

221

222 THE FALSE VETRALLA

Rosa ; works of art eminently of aunts and of
dowagers (I bethink me of some in my mother's
old home, and of a Bedfordshire dower-house
lined with the works of a long deceased
Juliana Countess of) yet with a disconcerting
kinship to Turner ; records of pre-railway
travel, how greatly I love you ! And how,
mostly for the sake of such, I loved that
Dennis's "Etruria," turning over its pages
in the whitewashed dining-room in the
Maremma.

Loved with the love which is all pangs and
longings : for beyond those hills we had seen,
above the endless myrtle and heather high to
the saddle, in hopeless blue distance, was there
not that hidden Etruscan Hinterland I seem
fated never to visit ? Sovana, Saturnia, Ferentino,
and so forth, that country, feeling so mysterious
and unattainable, between Siena and Rome, a
country of caves and tombs and oakwoods, and
feudal fastnesses.

Among these names which quite at random,
and irrespective of their importance in the book
itself, haunted my fancy and conjured therein,
was, foremost among many, Vetralla. By the
mere accident of its sharp sonority and suggestion
of glass, and its initial syllable telling of anti-
quity, Vetustas, Vetralla became one of the places
I got to long for during those drowsy evenings
over Dennis's book.

And suddenly, yesterday, there I was rushing,
in the swift lucid dream of my friend's great

THE FALSE \TTRALLA 228

motor-car, through that very country. And,
behold ! here was Vetralla !

It was not as mere fact, but it should have
been ; and. having given me the pang of
pleasure under that mistaken name, it will
remain henceforward connected therewith in my
mind, despite the circumstance that it was really
(and mistakenly !) called Vciano by the ma]«
and its inhabitants, and that we passed through
the ostensible Vetralla further on, in a dilTercnt
and most unsuitable landscape. This false —
for I suppose it must be considered as false
— Vetralla, mine and not other indiflerent people's
Vetralla — appeared all of a sudden as we
emerged out of the first woods of the southern
Ciminian slopes, those Ciminian woods of which
the poet Pascarella, who seems to have heard
it told direct by the Ancients, tells me they
were full of wizards in Etruscan days. The
country was indefinably odd, in a way no words
can tell ; for you are not telling its strangeness in
mentioning a winding, shallow gorge between
dark brown volcanic escarpments, tufted at this
season with budding broom. And in this
country it is set as a mural crown of dusky
russet houses with roofs lichened over the
very yellow of that broom on the rocks. Any-
way, the most mysterious earthborn little place
you could imagine, as if only half human, built
by goatfooted creatures or centaurs in that wild
country, or as if turning back to rock and scrub
after centuries of being lost, forgotten by the

224 THE FALSE VETRALLA

world of living men. It appeared again above
a torrent and a Roman bridge. And we dashed
under its battlemented walls, and into its square,
which, it being Whit Sunday, was full of decent-
looking country folk and soldiers in parade
uniform. And yet I feel as if no one save myself
has ever really been there. What other people
may have seen — those inhabitants and any
casual travellers — is certainly not the real place
which I saw.

And this to me remains Vetralla, Home of
Etruscan Lucumos, some of whom lie, believe
me, with gold-plate armour thin as the dead
leaves shed by oakwoods over them, and laurel
wreaths of beaten gold, and gold death-masks
for faces, somewhere in the brown volcanic rock of
that shallow gorge, ready to fall to dust and
vanish in thin air when those who gaze at them
shall take a new breath.

XXXIII

THE SCOTTISH PRINCE ON
THE APENNINE TOP

It happens sometimes that one has, rather than
delight at the time, the immediate sense that a
locahty is going to liaunt one. And this pre-
monition of its growth in memory and faney I
had that day at San Pcllegrino, and on the way
back, feehng, along with the weariness and the
desire to be back home, an imaginative clinging
to these places I did not wish to stay in. This
expectation has come true. That whole moun-
tainous region — the upland slopes of Sant'
Anna, where people were reaping the pale
Alpine corn against the sky-line, or threshing it
behind the black stone cottages and byres
marked by scant fruit-trees and red-berried
rowans— all these oddly northern remotenesses
tucked away beneath the scrub beech-woods
which girdle the sunburnt Apennine summits —
has already become a country of dreams and
desires in which my thoughts linger as in the
hill-pasture districts of Auvergne, the Cotswold
slopes of the Colne and Windrush, and the
hidden valleys, all milk and honey, of the
Bernese Jura ; thinlv peopled regions meaning

225 F

226 THE SCOTTISH PRINCE

openness to sky and safety from the madding
crowd, high, hidden, and as if securely locked
into one's thoughts.

Through these shallow, high-lying Apennine
valleys the road to San Pellegrino winds with a
steady, easy ascent, forgetful of the gorges and
precipices lower down, open to the sun and air,
ever facing the distant sweeps of mountain
chains ; deserted ; mile after mile with never
a cart, and crossed at most by the cows passing
from one subtle field to another, or the sheep
coming out of the beech-scrub to drink in the
rills flowery with Parnassus daisy. Rising
higher and higher, you are told by a cross-road,
almost under the rocky ridge tawny with
autumn bilberry, that it goes on the one side to
Sassuolo, the far-off, already Lombard, hunting-
palace of the d'Estes ; on the other, to the
Tuscan frontier at Turrite Cava, a cleft in the
marble mountains whence the eagles look down
on the Mediterranean. Everything up here
seems far, far off, even the places the roads
lead to !

A mile higher up is the pass of the Radici, the
highest, I believe, that these Apennines boast.
A rough stone inn among meadows and beech-
woods, a mere black, shutterless cube, with a
fringe of wind-warped beeches, might be some-
where above the Tyne or Tweed, but for the
mules and the stacked charcoal sacks surrounding
it. At this lonely place we left the gig, and took
a charcoal-burner to guide us to the sanctuary

ON THE APENNINE TOP 227

of San Pellegrino. We climbed with him along
a track, roughly paved and as lull of loose stones
as a watercourse, through the beech-scrub and
the bilberry ; the rough hornbeam hedge para-
pctting it from the precipices was set at intervals
with sad little broken shrines. A turn of the
])ath, and in a gap of this hedge there suddenly
appeared a great wave-like blue Carrara-peak.
Another hundred yards along that stumblesome
track, where a half-idiot beggar sits under a bush
in wait for the pilgrims returning from the shrine
with i:)aper flowers in their hats — a fresh turn,
and the rough paved track, now grown level,
seems suddenly to come to an end, cut short
between that wind-warped hedge and the slope
of orange bilberry. And where it ends in mid-
air, opposite, with nothing visible between,
behold, the whole chain of the Marble Mountains :
peak and jag and crag and crest, ascending,
twisting, like a band of pale-blue flames against
the blazing autumn sky.

They are, these Carraras, more than any other
mountains I have seen, mysterious even in their
unshrouded aerial splendour ; formed all of air
and light in shapes as of fire ; isolated from
every other range ; born of other race, not slowly
denuded into shape by frosts and rains, you would
think, but, risen like a chain of breaking waves
into the sky out of the sea ; shining sea-gods,
linked and embraced and reclining against the
blue sunlight as the wave-crests recline upon the
blue of the waters.

228 THE SCOTTISH PRINCE

There is something droll and yet somewhat
uncanny in the meeting of this godlike company
of mountains and the two mummies in brocade
and silver, displayed in the dreary black church
of pilgrimage ; flyblown pilgrims' inns and fly-
blown pilgrims" huckster-stalls of rosaries and
paper flowers all round. There is no village, no
barn or stable, not a tree or a bush ; and there
are no inhabitants save the priests, the rosary-
vendors, and wineshop-keepers, living off the
piety of the peasants who have scrambled up the
mountain short-cuts and along that mule -track
on the crest. It is a grim, filthy little place built
round those two mummies in their gilded glass
coffins, who have come, one wonders why or
whence, to profane, rather than to sanctify, that
pure rocky shrine of the winds and clouds, un-
conscious, those two saints like their hucksters
and publicans, of the immortal glory spreading
opposite.

We bought the penny life of Saint Peregrine,
with an illustration showing him assaulted by
" Fra Diavolo " robbers in sugar-loaf hats, a poem
on sale between Decameronian booklets and the
rhymed chronicles of the brigands Tiburzi and
Musolino. There is something drolly discon-
certing in the fact of that mummied saint,
venerated along with another (added, perhaps,
for symmetry, and suggestively named Saint
Blank) on that Apennine crag, being described
as a son of the King of Scotland.

One wonders by what chance he has really

ON THE APENNINE TOP 229

come to be there, that Saint Peregrine. The
suspicion arises Avhethcr the dried-up corpse,
miraculously discovered in the sixteenth century
in a hollow beech-tree among those rocks, may
not have been that of some smuggler or outlaw
skulking among those fastnesses where so many
principalities once marched together : dominions
of Este and of Malaspina, commonwealths of
Florence and of Lucca. Or may it not have
been — who knows ? — merely some village idiot,
like that poor boy squatted begging along the
road, who had strayed after the sheep and
perished among the mountain mists ? Or is it
really some early anchorite, some follower of St.
Columba, perhaps, whose grave should have
been in the heather of the Hebrides or alongside
the hazels of some Irish wishing-well, but whom
a fate propitious to Tuscan innkeepers and
hucksters had led above the woods and precipices
to figure as stage-king in that musty black
church, in purple and tarnished silver, with an
imperial crown of tinsel set down, in that glass
cofiin, alongside of his skeleton feet in silver-
braided shoes ?

Whichever he may really be, the situation
reminds me of the story of that dead Anchorite
of Tiberius' villa, sent in the eighteenth century
to England in lieu of an English squire who
had died at Capri ; the holy man from the South
now reposing in a family vault in Norfolk or
Essex !

But San Pellcgrino remains in my mind rather

230 THE SCOTTISH PRINCE

as the sanctuary of those divine marble moun-
tains ; pale-blue, luminous Titans arisen out of
the sea, and reclining together, at ease, but
watchful and braced like the other gods who
became once more marble rocks themselves, of
some great temple gable open to the sun and
storms.

XXXIV

DIVINITIES OF TUSCAN
SUMMER FIELDS

The first incident of the Tuscan summer is the
transformation, or, rather transfiguration, of the
small children. Speaking prosaically and with
regard to mere facts, what happens is that they
are divested of all upper garments and, what is
more to the point, of shoes and stockings. But
for the eye and fascinated heart and fancy,
a brand-new race appears miraculously from
nowhere : tiny boys and girls in that succinct
garment, waistcoat and breeches in one, fastened
in the back with missing buttons, which reduces
sex to a matter of a ribboned top-knot more or
less ; Gesu Bambinos and San Giovanninos and
Santi Innocenti for Donatello and the Delia
Robbias ; cupids, ptitti, baby fauns for the more
pagan Raphaelcsqucs and followers of Correggio,
all suddenly there, like the flowers which apj^car
after a day of showers and sunshine ; little
moving flowers themselves, flexible, tender,
fluffy, rosy, pearly, golden-brown, with indes-
cribable loveliness of brilliant, weather-stained
rags, suddenly arising (by that magic rite of

diminishing raiment) out of the cobbles of

231

232 DIVINITIES OF TUSCAN

slums and the dust and litter of roadside
hamlets.

The marvel is greatest in such squalid sur-
roundings ; but the right place for these creatures
is, of course, the fields. Several times of late I
have met in the grass lanes between the spaliered
vines, infant processions mimicking the Corpus
Christi magnificences of their elders : tiny
children, dressed out in garlands, carrying
banners of leaves and trailing wreaths and
streamers and discarded tins and pipkins,
drumming and fifing on imaginary instruments
and hymning in shrill, sweet tones to rustic
divinities, immanent in blossoming grapes and
wheat-in-the-ear and in budding baby souls.

Speaking of Corpus Christi has brought me,
of course, to the second episode in the Italian
summer's enchantment. It is, so to speak, the
sanctification of evening. Suddenly, after the
first hot days, you become aware of a new
blessedness in the world ; and the hour after
sunset becomes holy in the fields, in the rustling
valleys, like the summer duskiness of Italian
churches, when the glow of the square is filtered
through the black door velarium bellied with the
draught like a great sail, and the cool air is fresh
with the flowers stacked up on the altars. But
the sudden coolness of the fields, the twilight
beryl of the sky, the revelation to the taste and
the nostrils of all the green, wet lushness hidden
by day, of all the grasses which blossom in unseen
trickling place?, the dusk of the fields is not merely

SUMMER FIELDS 233

holy, like that of the churches ; it is something
more, divine, with the strange solemnity of the
pagan gods of the soil.

And once, I remember, the dusk took living
shape, the divinities stood revealed. It was at
the close of a burning day which had brought
fever to me, and that languor which will make
relief into happiness, and happiness into rapture.
The sun had dipped behind the hills, leaving the
distant valley of Florence luminous, when we got
with our cart to the first flanks of ]\Iorello, its
peaks dim, distant. Among the little cypress-
woods in the ineffable freshness we met some big
white calves browsing up-hill. Then they came
down, following their mothers along a stream-
bed, and stopped upon the soft turf to bite at the
white acacia-blossoms, which they resembled ;
a sort of emanation of the pale, green coolness,
with their quiet, gentle movements and almost
diaphanous whiteness. We tied up the cart and
walked a little way up the ravine, across the
grass ; and there we found more white calves
and heifers on the steep hillside, feeding among
the flowering broom above the stream, where the
nightingales whistled. One quite understood
mythology, the stories of Europa and lo : these
creatures might so well have been gods.

About two months after that undressing of
the children of which I have spoken as suddenly
peojjling Italy with eupids and baby St. Johns,
there comes the disrobing of the ground and its
transfiguration through the wheat-harvest. How

234 DIVINITIES OF TUSCAN

often has it come upon me with surprise, this
sense of relief, of a new world following on the
steps of the reapers ! The tree-trunks and
roots, the vine-branches become suddenly visible,
and the earth reveals itself, dry, pale, and almost
disembodied in the sheen of stubble. And then
all that much space, air, view, gained ! One
misses, indeed, the sweetness rising from the
cornfields at evening. But how far greater the
deliciousness of their being open to breeze and
light, of their long gleams and shadows, their
rosiness on which the light lies golden, the
shadows cut sharp and cool. And then the
freedom of walking over the stubble, of seeing
the other crops, young maize and beans and
sorghum, noting for the first time the little
green apples on the trees that bend over, and
the grapes, still minute, but quite shapely. One
watches the oxen ploughing once more between
the vine-garlands in the wonderfully sweet
twilights, when the sawing of the cicalas meets
for a moment the far gentler, but shriller, note
of the crickets : the two voices of the Italian
summer, so oddly suited, one to the blazing,
relentless day, the other to the gentle and friendly
night.

With all these sounds and sights are connected
my earliest impressions of Bagazzano, a half-
dismantled little villa, perhaps once a Medicean
shooting-box or fowling-house, among the thin
ilexes and cypresses of a solitary ridge looking
down on the Arno. It was mainly the im-

SUMMER FIELDS 235

pression, so unexpected in that liigh, remote
place, of some wonderfully beautiful stuccoes on
the outer ^vall of the tiny villa's tiny chapel :
great candelabra and baskets of flowers in
delicate film-like relief on a ground of worn-out
vermilion, half-efl'accd in parts, with the ex-
quisitely modelled limbs, the still more fasci-
nating mere shadowy outlinings. of two crouch-
ing Michelangelesquc nudes, a youth and a sjdvan
goddess, their slender thighs and strong bent
backs doubled and twisting like tree-trunks and
flower-stems ; figures which seemed to come and
go on that weather-beaten wall with the moving
shadows and gleams and one's own delighted
imagination. The chapel among the ilexes has
no vestige of Christian emblems ; nothing but
those pagan candelabra, masks, birds, and
flowers and Michelangelesquc supporters ; and,
instead of cross, two little stone obelisks, which
time or some hidden symbolical intention has
curved towards one another into something like
horns, such as are supposed to ward ofT the evil eye.
One fancies that this must have been the
retreat of some paganizing philosopher of the
late Renaissance. He would have built that
chapel in the ilex-grove, at a stone's-throw from
the villa portico, as a resting-place for all that he
knew and all that he cared should remain of him.

Nobis, quum seniel occidil hrevis lux,
Nox est perpetua una dormienda —

with what goes before and follows symbolized in

236 DIVINITIES OF TUSCAN FIELDS

those flowers and masks and fruits, and the pair of
sylvans outhned on the worn-off vivid vermilion.
Be this as it may, and whether there was ever
at that villa such a person and whether such were
his opinions or not, we walked down from
Bagazzano with things better than fancies and
verses, even by Catullus, filling our hushed and
delighted minds : the ineffable sweetness of hour,
season, and place, the blessedness of the past heat
of day and coming cool of night, the ripeness of
air among herb-grown rocks, its freshness in the
deep green of the trickling watercourses.

XXXV

MONTE ARGEXTARIO OR THE MAN
WHO SLEPT IN THE TRAIN

Beyoxd Civita Vccchia there comes into sight
— or, perhaps, only into my fancy — a double
coned island, emerging from the luminous mist
and the luminous white water, seen, as the train
speeds along the coast, across fields of flowering
asphodel, where the iron-grey bullocks are
grazing.

My only fellow-passenger having emptied his
pockets of a supply of fresh newspapers, and
disposed of them carefully for later perusal, has
pulled his cap over his eyes and settled to sleep
in the opposite corner, leaving me alone with the
Maremma landscape, which is spreading out and
folding up and then unfurling again as the train
speeds along. And I am glancing idly from it
into my memory, and every now and then, where
there is something I would clutch and keep,
scribbling vain words in my diary (if one can
speak of a diary where a single afternoon is
concerned) of this journey to Pisa from
Rome.

First there liad been Palo : the sea of enamel

violet, against grass powdered with daisies and

387

238 MONTE ARGENTARIO

dwarf jonquils, and a martello- tower, telling
of Saracen raids, seen through the smoke of
burning weeds : the shore where, so long ago,
we picked up, in the improbable black sands,
antique marbles rolled by the surf into fanciful
semblance of hearts.

Now, near Etruscan Corneto, stretched feudally
with towers and walls above the olive yards, my
eye and thoughts are caught by a flush stream
flowery with catkins of willows and poplars.
It must be the Marta ; and my thoughts
ascend its course to where it flows between
the forlorn green hillocks under the deserted
basilicas, carved like ivory reliquaries, of
Toscanella.

But I am suddenly drawn back into the
present. That island with the double cone — I
see it now over a wood of big black cork ilexes
sprayed over with flowering thorn — that island,
as I suspected from the first, must be Monte
Argentario. Yes. It is Argentario. Approaching
Orbetello the mountain rises above a great salt-
pond, fringed with dry sedge and pinewood.
The sun is setting, and as it sets it wraps the
mountain in its dim violet and russet mists and
shadows. The railway runs inland, losing sight
of the sea. Dusk steams up from the fields, and
there is light only in the highest sky. Monte
Argentario has become, once more, a mere
memory.

[The dark seems to wake up my fellow-
passenger. He raises himself in his corner, and,

MONTE ARGENTARIO 239

switching on the nearest electric light, unfolds
and sets to reading one after another of his many
newspapers.]

It is ten years now' that, staying inland in the
Marcmma, I was taken to jMonte Argcntario on
one of the olT-davs of the boar-hunting. We
went, more precisely, to Port* Ercolc, a fishing
place under the guns and glacis of a great fort
built by Ilapsburg Spanish kings. The object
of interest was a fine botanical garden of sub-
tropical plants, which a deceased Riscasoli,
brother to the famous statesman, had made him-
self among the rocks above the little Genoese-
looking harbour. But what remained in my
memory was none of those rare plants, but the
little house, recently empty of its solitary old
proprietor. It was built and furnished in the
1850 style, surely one of the ugliest ever invented,
but already pathetic in its recent, and yet so
utter, pastness. Or, perhaps, what made me
think so was its having remained exactly as the
dead owner had left it, his paper-fulls of dried
plants, his ugly little souvenirs, and odds and
ends, all strewn about, his guns and swords (he
had been a General and fought in all the wars of
Liberation), and his little library of classics and
books on botany and agriculture, exactly as he
had left it all. And then the walls of the little
rep-and-horsehair rooms were covered with the
photographs of the heroic generation which —
so few years ago and yet it feels in so remote a
past ! tlid the making of what was to become the

240 MONTE ARGENTARIO

inglorious, jog-trot Italy of to-day. There they
were, Charles Albert and Victor Emmanuel, and
Garibaldi on his little white Arab, and Ricasoli,
and Cavour and La Marmora, and Poerio, chin-
bearded and moustachioed, in pegtop trousers,
with appropriate ladies in cachemires folded in
a point upon their valanced crinolines : the
heroic women (such as Meredith drew) who sent
their sons and husbands and lovers to die
magnanimously in battle or at daybreak in
prison-yards ; or (worse almost) into foreign
lands, whence — who knows ? — they might never,
never return to Italy. And in the midst of these
little brown, ungainly photographs and ghostly
daguerreotypes there also hung prints of patriotic
battles — Novara and Sanmartino and Montebello
— so hideous and so venerable in their long-
tarnished frames. What a gone, gone Past,
this Italy of Stendhal's Duchess and Meredith's
Vittoria ! The bailiff sent in the usual tray of
sweet Vin Santo and finger biscuits, and there
was a great exchange of polite inquiries with the
friends who had brought me. But I sat, so to
speak, in the presence of the poor old dead
General, who had slowly flickered away a once
heroic life among his rare palms and cactuses
and his flowers between sheets of blotting-paper,
all alone on the remote little island off that
malarious, deserted Tuscan coast.

For, to all intents and purposes, save that you
get to it along a dyke from the mainland, Monte
Argentario is the island nearest to shore of the

MONTE ARGENTARIO 241

Tuscan Archipelago, and perhaps an iskuid
altogether when the Etruscans and their Phoeni-
cian and Greek customers came for the tunny that
is fished there still, and for the silver to which
it must owe its lovely and singularly fitting name.
An island for the Odyssey, between the deep and
violet Tyrrhene sea and the shallow salt lake of
periwinkle blue ; some Greek names still re-
maining, Port" Ercole and Talamone ; and name-
less mounds of lost Etruscan cities among the
myrtle thickets of the surrounding capes. This
promontory, as the guide-books call it, is an
island also in the especial charm of completeness
and independence which only islands have : a
great double-coned hill, with sharp, rocky out-
line against the sky, and breaking into rocky
creeks against the sea, but covered with scrub
as with dark, silvery smoke, and widening into
shallow valleys with little reed-propped vines,
and big, big fig-trees, and fields of artichoke, and
little walled-in gardens over-topped by tall
lemon-trees, orchards scooped out among the
lentisk and myrtle of the rocks, and big olive-
trees also, where the rivulets, between high
feathery reeds, go into the purply-blue sea ; a
wonderful, sweet, solemn, separate place, a little
kingdom all to itself.

The sea about Monte Argentario is, however,
not so beautiful as the shallow lake which
separates it from the mainland, and in which
steep the reddish cyclopean walls and Spanish
forts of the little town of Orbctello.

242 MONTE ARGENTARIO

We had our midday meal there, in the house
of my friends' baihff, where, in the office, above
the shelves of ledgers, hang the photographs of
three famous brigands of the neighbouring
Maremma — Tiburzi, Ranuzzi, and another, in
their goatskins and great cartridge-belts, erect,
but dead, propped up on staves as the huntsmen
prop up the wild boar which they have shot. The
front of the bailiff's house was on the narrow
street, the long hospital front, of the sad little
malarious town. But the back windows open
upon that wonderful pale-blue salt lake, where
gulls and wild duck hover over the wattled nets,
and big bullocks wade in the shallow water ; in
the foreground the jutting walls and bastions of
the fortifications, even as in some classic land-
scape (with appropriate Latin distich in the
engraving) by Claude or Vernet ; and, beyond,
the great island- mountain, unsubstantial and
silvery in the winter sunshine, of Argentario.

That was ten years ago. And now I am
travelling from Rome to Pisa, rehearsing it all
as the train shifts those places in and out of sight.
My only fellow-passenger, as I have said, is a
man who has slept the whole time that there has
been daylight and set to reading as soon as it
grew dark. He strikes me as vaguely allegorical
of so much travelling through the world, and
also, even more, through life. For the electric
lamps are inconveniently high up, the train is
jolting as hard as it can, the print of those news-
papers he is reading is certainly bad and the

MONTE ARGENTARIO 243

telegrams will be contradicted to-morrow. Whc re
as those hours of sunlight have sped along the
Etruscan sea, among the asphodels of the
pasture and the myrtle thickets of the hillsides ;
and, as I have been saying, there has slowly
come, vision-like, into sight, and slowly been
blotted out by sunset mists, the double-coned
island promontory of Monte Argentario.

And this parable of the Man Who Slept in the
Train, brings us back to the lesson I have en-
deavoured to point, in my initial allegory of the
" Tower of the Mirrors."

THE WORKS or rERXOX LEE

UxiroKM Edition. Crown 8vo. 3s 6</ net
Standard. — ••Vitiioii Lii- pussetises a mind richly iuil<iiod wiili tli'-
love of tlie tinest litoratiin', and distin;,'uislieil by jusi that touch nf j);irit-
dox, of the unexjKcti'd, whicli is the other iudif^peusable ruquisiti' of the
true easayijt. Also her philosophy is never ag'jjrressively didactic, but
alivays ref reshiutr and helpful."

THE ENCHANTED WOODS

AND OTHER ESSAYS ON THE GENIUS OF PLACE

Ol'tlook. — " The book is one to lie enjoyed for its slieer Ixinuty of
style, by those who have never visited the places described ; but tliu^e who
have will enjoy the iironzlii^' aptness of ei)iihet."

GiAROiAN. — •' Vernon Lee's peculiar y:ift is to be seeu at its best iu
'The EuchaiiiiHl Woods.' . . . She represents her feelings in brand,
brii,'ht touches, at once powerful and delicate."

Pall >Iall. — "The jiicturcsijue aud facile prose which this writer
has made well-known for many distinctive finalities."

L)LXDEE Advertiskr. — " Delightful and su^yestive pen-pictures . . .
delicately wrouyht with shrewdly directed colouriuif that has all the direct
effect of an intoxicating^ IK'rfumc.''

Ladv's Pictorial. — "As a writer Vernon Lee is full of charm and
l>oetlc fancies . . . by the peculiar matfic of her pen she can throw a
charm over the most commonplace tif subjects, and to her it is thee;isie.-t
thing- in the world to see all woods through a veil of eucliantmeut."

THE SPIRIT OF KOxME

LEAVES FROM A DIARY

Spectator. — '• There is only one thing to do, to find n place for ' The
Spirit of Rome ' ou our «helf of treasures."

Daily Mail. — "Her impressione of Rome an- vividly cauyht and
delicately described."

Dai LY Telkgh APii. — ''.\ new volume oi essays from the i>eu of Venion
l.<-e i' -ure of a welcome fromall readers who aiijiredate literary artistry. . .
The author is well equipped for the dillicult task .sho has essayed — that
of representing the 'spirit' of the most fascinating of cities by means of
the printed word; she is gifted with the power of seeing the'essentlal
Items in a scene."

Liverpool Po8t. — "Tlie book sncceeds in conveying a wonderfully
vivid imprexsion."

SENTIMENTAL TRAVELLER

NOTES <».N I'LACES

HoRNiN<i I'oHT. — "A Ix'autiful book ; an oasis of leisureand beauty
:iuildHt the nol»y literature of the day."

Scotsman. — 'In brilliant light and sbadi-, in elusive and wayward
..race, in flaml>oyanl fancy, and In other rare literary ijualitles her
h.iudlwork may lay claim In the line of succeiwlon to that of Sleriir."

(JLOBE. — "It Isalwayna pleasure to meet with Vernon Lee be she
Hi home or abroa<l. A cultured, kindly, siM-lnble Iciok "

THE WORKS OF VERNON LEE

The Spkctator. — "The grace] ot diction marks one who is at
once a moniluinc and a cosuiopolitan, and a srace of thought that some-
times recalls P.. L. Stevenson, and even here and tliere reminds one of
Emerson. . ."

VITAL LIES

STUDIES OP SOME VARIETIES OF RECENT OBSCURANTISM
In Two Volimes. Ten Shillings net

Academy. — " Undoubtedly we are in need of a warning in the inter-
ests both of philosophy and of trnth. Vernon Lee has uttered that warning
in two volumes of exceedingly acute analysis. This work is no mere
captions criticism of intellectual tendencies, biit a real and serious contri-
bution to thought and life which no thinker can afford to miss."

Globe. — " Vernon Lee's writings are invariably suggestive, and
intellectually stimiilating."

Liverpool Courier. — " A masterly analysis of Pragmatism. It is
a book well worth the attention of the thoughtful."

Uniform Edition. Crown 8vo. 3s 6rf net

HOKTUS VITAE

ESSAYS ON THE GARDENING OF LIFE

Times. — " There are many charming flowers in it . . . the swift to-
and-fro of her vivid, capricious mind carries the reader hither and thither
at her will, and she has such wise suggestive things to say, . . 'Whenever
and wherever she speaks of Italy, the sun shines in this garden of hers,
the south wind stirs among the roses."

Standard. — "There are imagination and fancy in this volume, a
wise and independent outlook on society, an undercurrent of genial humour,
and, what is perhaps still more rare, an invitation to Hunk."

Athen.t;um. — " The talented lady who writes under the name of
Vernon Lee has in her new volume of essays much to say on the conduct
and management of life, as well as on the culture of the lesthetic and other
senses."

HAUNTINGS

FANTASTIC TALES

Saturday Review. — " Seldom have any stories of pure fantasy
contained more genuine and excellent qualities . . . passages of real
beauty, sensitive and glowing descriptions of some Italian scene, breathing
the very spirit and essence of what she describes. Above all the stories
are picturesque, drawn with delicate and brilliant touches, and rich in
colour and design."

THE irOKKS OF rjJBXOX LEE

LMkokm Kdition. Cuown 8\<). o.< til/ NKl-

Daily Telegraph. — "Vernon Lio is a writer wlioso gift of style is
mcli »-> to reniiiT lit'r uiusin'jsninl ile.-'cription-; in es.sny furm iiIwajTJattrac-
tive to the reader with wliat may 1k.> tenued ii literary palate."

UMBO AND OTTTEK ESSAYS

TU WHICH IS ADDKD 'AUIAUXE IX MANTUA"

OlTLOOK. — "A volume of e-siiys which shuwsVeruou Lee to lie ii
iua.-t<.Tof this lighter form "f literature. It is lull of huumur an'l truth."

Mairice Baring iu the Mor.m.ng TofiT. — "It is iuipussible to give
in a Ijrief .sjiaee any idea of the beatity aud riclmcss of this drama, for in
;;ivluy: a mere .skeleton all that is important is omitted. To appreciate
it one must read it all."

OBriERVLR. — "This is an exquisite little literary fantasy, rich with
tlioujfhtand poetry and the mcauini,^ of life. It is written in very tine
En^'lish."

A L T H E A

UIALOGLES OX ASI'IRATIOXS AND DUTIES

Satibday Ueview. — '"There is an honesty of thous^ht and puri>ose
in these pa]>crsand i yift of exprossion which make them stimulating' aud
deli:;hlful."

Literabv To.st — "Vernon L;e has a charmiui; gift of description,
coupled with a strong love aud sense of colour."

Irish Ixdepende.nt. — "There is no gainsayin;^- the fact of Vernon
I,ee'» siug^nlar liten»ry chainu. . . Thoso who have rend others of her
delightful Tolumes will not hesitate in renewing her (ic(iualntance."

V A NI T A S

roLITE STORIES IXCLLDIXG "A FUIVOLOUS CONVEUSIOX "

Daily Mail. — " Vernon Lee's gift of dollrate ami expressive jirose is
well known, and ha« won for its owner a secure place in the world of letters.
TlH-se storii-s are quite up to the high Htaudaid of their author's previous
aclilevemeiu."

Ot TLOOK. -•' A flnished and moving piece of art from lioyluniug
to end."

Globe. — " These Miorics are cleverly written in a bright literary
w..y ; the situations are ({oo<l : the points nilsc<| ure delicate."

EVEMNU Htanuakd. — "There Is dlsiinciion in every chapter."

ScorsMAJt. — "Clever and exquisitely written, like all the work of
uii- i-ilented lady."

(; E i\ 1 U S LOCI

N'^ri;-: ON rL.\(i:.'^

THE WORKS OF VERNON LEE

Unii'orm Edition. Cuown Svo. 3s 6d net

The Xation. — "We are grateful to this coterie for revealing the
opinions of the serene and siunificant intelligence wlio signs herself
Vernon Lee."

POPE JACYNTH

AND OTHER FANTASTIC TALES

LAURUS NOBILTS

CHAPTERS ON ART AND LIFE

The Spectator — " It is long indeed since we met with a volume of
art criticism so wise, so atti active, so suggestive as "Laurus Nobilis."
Interspersed with those exquisite pieces of imagination in which few
living writers can surpnss Vernon Lee, the book is indeed too full of
charm, originality and wisdom to be quickly read or dealt with in a few
lines. It should be bought and studied."

Morning Post. — " Her laiul^fape is full of delight, and for those
who are curious in method hers is worth studying. There is a real love
of beauty, an intellectual curiosity and honesty which ought to prove
jirofitubly disturbing to the average lover of art."

RENAISSANCE STUDIES AND
FANCIES

THE COUNTESS OF ALBANY

With Three Illustrations.
WITH C. ANSTRUTHER-THOMSON

BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

AND OTHER STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGICAL iESTHETICS
Dehv Svo. 12s M net.

Manchester Guardian. — ■• These studies contain a gieat deal that
is invaluable for English students of jesthetics."

Daily Graphic. — " In this thorough, comprehensive and exhaustive
manner have the a\ithors given expression to much earnest thought — the
fruit of honest and sincere work. Into these realms like-minded persons
may follow them with profit to themselves."

Sunday Times. — "These stimulating studies in psychological {esthe-
tics, which are indeed a monument of learning, observation, and analysis,
musi rank as an invaluable contribution to a difficult subject."

LONDON : JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD, VIGO ST. W.

NEW YORIC : JOHN LANE COMPANY

TORONTO : BELL AND COCKBURN

JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION
BY ARTHUR H. ADAMS.

GALAHAD JONES. A Tragic Farce. Crown 8vo. 6/-

With i6 full-page Illustrations by Norman Lindsay.

•«• Gal&had .lonos is a middle-aged bank clerk, with a family. One day, on
his way home, s letter tails to his leet Irom the balcony ol a house he is passing.
It i» addressed " To You," and on reading it he discovers that he is requested
to meet the writer in the garden of the hoa<e at 10 o'clock that night. In a spirit
of knight .errantry, he decides to do so, and learns that the writer— a young girl—
ia kept pra<'1ically in prison by her father, because of her affection for a man of
whom he does not approve. The chivalry of Galahad Jones plunges him into
many difficulties, and leads to some very awkward and extremely amusing situation*.

A TOUCH OF FANTASY. Crown 8vo. 6/-

A Romance For Those who are Lucky Enough to Wear Glas.ses.

Daily Graphic—" A romance full of tenderness and charm, and written with
an artist's love of words lor their own sake. Mr. Adams has delicacy ol observation
ftnd insight."

Pall Mall Gazttt*—" Mr. Adams seems likely to enhance his reputation with
the new novel. Mr. .^dams writes well, and his characters live, and the result
M % book which is interesting and quite out of the common."

BY GIRO ALYI.

THE SAINTS Pr^OGRF-SS: A Novel. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Translated from the Italian of Ciro Alvi by Mary Gibson.

•,• Signor Ciro Alvi has written a long and most sympathetic novel dealing
with the life of one of the noblest spirits of the Christian Church who was perhaps
the most extraordinary man of his age. The somewhat dissolute early life of the
founder of the Franciscan Order is deltly outlined, the young man's innate goodness
ol heart and kindly disposition being clearly apparent even in the midst of his
O(t«nt«t>ous gaiety and sudden impulses.

BY W. M. ARDAGH.

THE MAGAD.^. Crown 8vo. 6/-

PaJJ Hall Gazette—" ' The Ma«ada ' is a store-house of rare and curious learn-
ing ... it it a well-written and picturesque story of high adventure and deeds
of derring-do."

Obitrier—" The book has admirably caught the spirit of romance."
Daily ChronicU-" ' The Ma«ada ' is a One and finely told story, and we
•-.•ngratulate Mr. Ardagh."

THE KNIGHTLY YEARS. Crown Svo. 6/-

•,• In 'The Knlghlly Year* " the author of "The Ma«idA " takes u« back
once more to the Canary Ulanda In the days ol Isabella the Catholic. The tale
deaU with the aftermath of conquest*, when " the first use the Islanders made ol
their newly.»cquir»<l moral oode was to apply It to their rulers." The hero of the
story U the body-servant of the profligate Governor of Gomera, whoM love affairs
become painfully Involved with those ol bis maater. In the course ol hU many
adventures we come acroe* Queen Isabella herself, the woman to whom every man
• as loyal save her own huiband ; and countless Bpanliih worthies, seamen, eoldierk.
governors and prleiti, all real men, the makers of Empire four hundred years ago.
The book abounds In quaint aaylngs both ol Spaniard and native, while the loy«
making ol the simple young hero and hU child wlie weaves a pretty thread •^
romai.ce tbreugb the stirring tale ol adventure.

JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION

BY ALLEN ARNOT.

THE DEMPSEY DIAMONDS; A Novel. Crown 8vo. 6/-

"f* This is the story of the secret transference of a fortune; and the scene is
laid mainJy in two old houses in two Scottish villages, one on the east coast, one
buried in midland woods. The tale is of the old slow days of twenty years ago
before the tyranny of speed began, but it is swayed throughout and borne to its
close by the same swift passions that sway the stories of men and women to-day,
and will sway them till the end oJ time.

BY H. F. PREYOST BATTERSBY.

THE SILENCE OF MEN. Crown 8vo. 6/-

*«* Lynne is a girl who shows a strong liking for a change of surname.
Indeed, it is not always certain by what name she has a right to be called. March,
a young civilian of great promise, meets her on the boat going out to India, and
offers her the hospitality of his hoiise, which is kept by an unmarried sister.
March and Lynne become married— and secretly so at Lynne's express wish. After
a brief time she bolts to England with Lord Rupert Dorrington, an A.D.C., and
cables that she lias married him. While on leave March comes across her at a
fashionable ball in London. Meanwhile he has fallen in love with another girl,
but Lynne declares that if he marries her she will cry the true facts from the
housetops.

By a cunning arrangement of circumstance the reader is made aware of the
fact that March's marriage has been all along invalid, which of course puts a
different complexion upoa Lynne's matrimonial position.

Mr. Battersby handles the story in a very masterful way, and his descriptions
of Indian scenery and social life in London show the quality of personal observation.

THE LAST RESORT. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Oiservei — " A really stirring novel— a novel of flesh and blood and character,
of quiet everyday life, and of life at its most strenuous and heroic . . . admirable
psychology ... a book to remember."

BY GERARD BENDALL.

THE ILLUSIONS OF MR. & MRS. BRESSINGHAM.

A Novel. Crown Svo. 6/-

" A delightful, farcical comedy of modern life . . . natural, spirited dialogue
. . lively entertainment."

THE PROGRESS OF MRS. CRIPPS-MIDDLEMORE.

A Novel. Crown Svo, 6/-

Pall Mall Gazette—" Mr. Gerard Bendall is to be congratulated on having
written an extremely amusing novel in which the leading idea and the final
reflection are sufficiently refreshing in these days of miscellaneous fiction."

Observei — " Mr. Gerard Bendall knows how to jxjke amiable fun at people.
He writes in a leisur«ly way, and his book is full of talk— some of it extremely
good talk."

2

JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION

BY PAUL BERTRAM

THE SHADOW OF POWER. Third Thousand. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Timta — " Few readers have taken up ' The Shadow of Power ' and come laco to
lace with Don Jaimie de Jorquera, will lay it down oi refuse him a hearing until
the book and his adventures c^me to as end."

Daily Mail—" This is a book that ruts deep into nature and experience. We
commend it most heartily to di<«erning readers, and hope it may take its place
wi"h the best historical noTcls."

THE FIFTH TRUMPET. A Novel. Crown 8vo. 6/-

iforniuff Pott—" A remarkably strong book. . . . This is a book lor those
to read who like an historical novel that touches real issues, and even (or those
who are on the look out for A NEW SENS.VTION.-

BY HORACE BLEACKLEY.

A GENTLEMAN OF THE ROAD. Crown 8Vo. 6/-

.-\iithor of " Ladies Fair ami Frail," etc.

•,• As the title implies, this is a very gallant novel: an eighteenth century
story of abductions, lonely inns, highwaymen and hangmen. Two men are In love
with Margaret Crofton : Colonel ThornJey, an old villain, and Dick Mayuard, who
is as youthful as he is virtuous. Tbornley nearly succeeds in compelling Margaret
to marry him, (or he has in bis possession a document sadly incriminating to her
father. Mayuard settles Thornley, but himself in his turn is " up against it." He
is arrested lor complicity in the highway tbelts o( a glad but graceless yoting
ruffian. Both are sentenced to death, but a great edort is made to get them
reprieved. It would be a pity to divulge the climax cunningly contrived by Mj.
Bieackley. save to say that the book ende in a scene of breathless intarest be(ore
tb« Tyburn gallows.

BY EX-LIEUTENANT BILSE.

LIFE LN A GARRISON TOWN. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Also in Paper Cover i/- net.
The suppressed German Novel. Wilh a preface written by the
author whilst in London, and an introduction by Arnold White.

Truth—" The dijgr»<«'lu! eiposure* of the book were expr<vsly admitted to
be true by the Minister ol War in the Reichntag. What the book will probably
tuggest to you ii, that German militarism is cutting its own throat, and will one
d»v hf hoist with its cw.'i ix-tard."

BY WALTER BLOEM.

THi: IKON Vi:.\K A Novel Crown Svo. 6/-

Translatcd from the German by Stella Bloch.

*,* This remarkable novel depicts in vivid word painting the final struggle
between France and (icrmany, iti the year IH70. The advance o( the German
troopf, the Umous battle o( Splcheren, the (earlul cavalry encounter of Rczouville,
the straggle and capitulation of 8tra«sburg are all incidents in this woudprlully
graphic narrative. A love-story runs through the book, telling o( the (atelul
attraction o( a French officer lor a German girl. As may well be imagined, the
path ol their live* Is betel with many obsta/-le'. but alter great tribulations they
are reunited under very pathetic circum«tancei>. Another finely drawn character
is that oi a bypericntitive gilted young musician, translormed, during these time*
ol itreu, into a strong .nan o( action.

"The Iron Year" created an extraordinary rendition in Germany. So great
WM tb« demand (or tb« book that twenty editions were exhausted. The German
Emi<orur read It aloud to the member* ol the Boyal Family circle during the
8prin«.

3

JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION
BY PETER BLUNDELL.

THE FINGER OF MR. BLEE. A Novel. Crown 8vo. 6/-

*,* The amusing adventures of Harold Blee, a youthful Eurasian, form th«
main theme ol this original novel. Harold is brought into contact with the two
rival factions of the local British society, and perpetrates many works of mischief,
to the discomfiture of the rich and pompous Mrs. Gladstone Mortimer and to the
suppressed amusement of her enemies. He is a most versatile boy, whose quaint
quips and irresistible antics serve a very usefijl purpose, when he is instrumental in
smoothing oui the course of love for Harry McMucker, his employer's son.

BY SHELLAND BRADLEY.

ADVENTURES OF AN A.D.C. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Westminste}' Gazette—" . . . makes better and more entertaining reading ■tha-n
oine out of every ten novels of the day. . . . Those who know nothing about
Anglo-Indian social life will be as well entertained by this story as those who
know everything about it."

Tiiney—" Full of delightful humour."
AN AMERICAN GIRL AT THE DURBAR. A Novel.

Crown 8vo. 6/-

*,* A charming love story, containing a vivid and picturesque account of th«
Durbar.

Daily Chronicle—" Here is a truly delightful work which should prov« of
jiterest to a wide class of readers — a book for a dull day."

BY EYELYN BRENTWOOD.

HENRY KEMPTON. A Novel. Crown 8vo. 6/-

*«* In his second novel, Evelyn Brentwood has again given us a vivid picture
of soldier life, and has again chosen for his hero a very unconventional character.
Cool and calculating, ambitious and heartless, Henry determines to climb the
social ladder by every means in his power. Articled to a solicitor when the story
opens, he is only waiting for an opportunity to follow his inclinations and enter
the army, when an accidental meeting with a duke's daughter precipitates matters,
and he immediately throws up the study of the law. Later, we follow his career
as a .soldier; see how he falls under the spell of one of his senior officers in the
24th Hu-ssars; how he wins the V.C for the mere purpose of bringing his name
into prominence ; how he is invalided home and meets Lady Violet for the second
time; and finally how he is taught, through his experience with a worthless woman,
to estimate at its true value the love of one who stands by him in the hour of
his humiliation.

HECTOR GRAEME. Third Thousand Crown 8vo. 6/

*** The outstanding feature of "Hector Graeme" is the convincing picture it
gives of military life in India and South Africa, written by one who is thoroughly
acquainted with it. Hector Graeme is not the great soldier of fiction, usually
depicted by novelists, but a rather unpopular officer in the English army who
is given to strange fits of unconsciousness, during which he shows extraordinary
physic powers. He is a man as ambitious as he is unscrupulous, with the desire
but not the ability to become a Napoleon. The subject matter of the story ia
unusual and the atmosphere thoroughly convincing.

Morning Leader — " Provides much excitement and stvaiglitforward pleasure.
A remarkable exception to the usual boring novels about military life."

JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION

BY JAMES BRYCE

THE STORY OF A PLOUGH BOY. Au Aulobiography.

Crown 8vo. 6/-

•,• As will be seen Irom the title ot ita part»— " The Farm." "The Mansion,"
"The Cottage "—the characters whose passions and interests make the plot ol thia
itory are drawn Irom the households ol the Labourer, the Farmer and the Squire;
the book is tberetore an attempt to present country lite in all its important
aspects. In thi«, again, it differs Irom all other Doveb ol the soil in our own or
I>erbap9 in an; language; its author writes not Irom book-kuowlcdgc or hearsay or
eren obserTaiion. but Irom experience. He has !i»ed what he describes, and under
the power ot his realism readers will Icel that they are not so much t(l<inciug
orer printed pages as mixing with living men and women. But the story h.iJ
interest for others than the ordinary novel-reader. It appeals as strongly to tho
many earneat minds that are now concerned with the questions of Land and
Industrial Reform. To such its very lalthfalness to life will suggest anfiwers
atartling, p«rhape, bat certainly arresting.

BY WILLIAM CAINE.

HOFFMANN S CH.XN'CE. A Novel. Crown 8vo. 6/-

•,' This is a realistic story of the stage which bears the obvious impreas ol
truth. Michael Hoffman is a struggling musician of tremendous talent. He is
introduced to Orde, a very rich dillettante. They collaborate in a blend of comic
opera and musical comedy. Their music is clever and tuneful, but the libretto,
aia<, brings them to grief. There is plenty of feminine interest in the book and
•ome clever sketches ol " women who do things."

itorniny Port—" The most considerable piece of work Mr. Caine has yet given
nt. ' Hoffman's Chance ' would have been worth writing merely for the presenta-
tion of Orde the Ass ai.d P!:yche the Cat— especially the actress, whose porlraitixr«
It one of the most vivid and effective present&tioo« of cattiness that ha« ever come
oar way."

BY DANIEL CHAUCER.

THE SIMPLE LIFE. LIMITED. Crown 8vo. 6/-

*.* This novel has a very decided quality ol catire which Is inspired by the
oonventioir ol the unconventional. Evidently Mr. Chancer knows the Simple I^ile
from the \aaide, and bis reflections will both arouse and amase tboM who know Ik
only irom catu^l allnitiona. Many well-known Hxure« will be reoognizcd, though not
in all casci ander their proper names, and, aj In the caae of Mr. Mallock'i " New
Repablic." Society will b« busy dotting the " i's " and croaing the " ft."

THE NEW IIUMPTY DUMPTY Crown 8vo. 6/-

Olohf--" Hrilliant enler'ainmcnt . . . there is an extraordinary feeling lor
plot ai:d incident, and an irre>i<lible sense of satiric humour."

Palt Hall OazrtI*—" The paeudonymoun author of 'The Simple Life' giTM
n« In 'The New Ilumpty Uuraply ' a volume ktill more brilliaui ; to brilliant is
It. with such a rar«re ol flr«t-cla« experience, that there will be keen curlo«i(y to
know who baa written the*« works."

JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION
BY MAUD CRUTTWELL.

FIRE AND FROST. A Novel. Crown 8vo. 6/-

*,* Fire is an Egyptian Prince and Frost is an English girl living in Florence.
The impetuous and passionate temperament of the Oriental is matched against
the steadfast rational nature of the heroine. The uncompromising desire oi the
former is to make the English girl his wife, and the circumstances under which
she is reluctantly brought to consent are original but entirely convincing. Thence-
forth the struggle is on the woman's part, as she finds herself pitted against the
fierce vacillating will of her husband, and the jealous intrigues of a mercenary
little Florentine marchesa — a character brilliantly drawn— and her satellites. The
outcome of this battle of temperaments is deeply interesting. The natures of
East ard We^t in conflict have been employed as material for fiction already,
but it can safely be said that never have the dramatic possibilities of the subject
been treated with such judgment as in this novel. The author makes full use
of her power of characterization in conveying the action of the story to the reader
with a force only to be found in the work of a really accomplished writer.

BY SIDNEY DARK.

THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT BE KING. A Novel.

Crown 8vo. 6/-

" It is only when a man does things for which he is not intended that his
experiences become really interesting. For example, supposing that Sir Herbert
Tree had gone to the South Polar regions instead of Sir Ernest Shackleton, what
a delightful book would have resulted! So with me. Although I cannot claim
any moral for my story it may not be without amusement. The adventures of a
square peg in a round hole are always delightful, except, perhaps, to the square
peg.

" So I start to relate the life of Fennimore Slavington, who had greatness
thrust upon him much against his will and much to the discomfort of himself and
many others."— Extract from the Prologue.

BY MARION FOX.

THE BOUNTIFUL HOUR. A Novel. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Author of "The Hand of the North."

*t* This is the story of a girl's life in the final years of the eighteenth century,
the background of the plot lying around Olney in the time oi Cowper and Newton,
with the contrasted atmosphere of London in the days of the Prince Regent. With
all of these the heroine, Charlotte Hume, oomes in contact.

The shadow which is cast across the plot is the outcome of a promise, given
by Howard Luttrell in his younger days to a woman of easy reputation, of whom
he soon tired, but to whom he had passed his word that whilst she lived he would
never marry. In later life he meets Charlotte Hurne, with whom, almost
unconsciously, he falls in love. On awakening fully to the fact, and finding the
other woman still living, he brings the solving of the problem to the girl herself.
Luttrell is the last of a long line of men and women, who, whatever they may or
may not have done, never broke their word. The way in which Charlotte cuts the
knot must be left to the patience of the reader to find out.

The book does not pretend to being an historical novel, but a pKJrtrayal of
certain aspects of middle-class life some hundred or more years ago.

JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION
THE WORKS OF ANATOLE FRANCE, in English.

Edited by Frederic Chapman. Demy 8vo. 6/-

THP: opinions of JKROME COIGXARD. a Translation by
Mrs. Wilfrid Jackson.

ON LIFK AND LETTERS. A Translation by A. W. Evans.

Vols. 2, 3 c*t 4.

THE GODS ARE ATHIRST. A Translation by Alfred Allinson.

Already Published.

MY FRIENDS BOOK A Translation by J. Lewis May.

JOCASTA AND THE FAMISHED CAT. A Translation by
Mrs Farlkv.

THE ASPERATIONS OF JEAN SERVIEN. A Translation by
Alfrko Allinso.n.

AT THE SIGN OF THE REINE PEDAUQUE. A Translation
by Mrs. Wilfrid Jackson.

ON LIFE AND LETTERS. Vol. i.

THE RI;d lily, a Translation bv Winifred Stephens.

MOTHl.R OF PEARL. A Translation by the Editor.

THE CRIME OF SYLVESTRE BONNARD. A Translation by
Lafcm)IO Hkakn.

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS. A Translation by Alfred

ALLI.NSt>.N.

THE WELL OF ST. CLARE. A Translation by Alfred Allinson.
BALTHASAR. .K Translation by Mrs. John Lane.
T H.M.s. A Translation by ROBERT B. Douglas.

7

JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION

THE WORKS OF ANATOLE FRANCE, in English— cotilinued.
THE WHITE STONE. A Translation by C. E. Roche,
PENGUIN ISLAND. A Translation by A. W. EvANS.
THE MERRIE TALES OF JACQUES TOURNEBROCHE.

A Translation by Alfred Allinson.
THE ELM TREE ON THE MALL. A Translation by M. P.

WiLLCOCKS.

THE WICKER-WORK WOMAN. A Translation by M. P.

WiLLCOCKS.

BY JOHN GORE.

THE BARMECIDES FEAST. Crown 8vo. 3/6 net

With Illustrations by Arthur Penn.
*,* A book which will delight lovers ol humour.
Daily News and Leader—" A book which MR. BALFOUR WOULD ENJOY."

BY A. R. GORING-THOMAS.

MRS. GRAMERCY PARK. Crown 8vo. 6/-

JVorld—" In the language ol the heroine hersell, this, her story, is delightlully
' bright and cute." "

Observe}-—" Fresh and amusing."

THE LASS WITH THE DELICATE AIR. Crown 8vo. 6/-

*»* In his new novel Mr. Goring-Thomas relates the history ol a young girl
wUoiB beautiful face is a mask that allures. Round the history of " The Lass witU
the Delicate Air " is woven the story of the Hicks family. Mrs. Hicks keeps a
lodging house in Chelsea, and has theatrical ambitions. The author has keea
powers of observation and a faculty of " getting inside a woman's mind " and the
same witty dialogue that was so commented upon in " Mrs. Gramercy-Park " is
again seen in the new work. The scene of the book is laid partly in Londoa and
partly in Paris.

WAYWARD FEET. Crown Svo. 6/-

*,* This book is a departure on the part of Mr. Goring-Thomas, and is a
brilliant piece ol work. The scene ol the book alternates between St. Wulphy-
turmer a mediaeval fortified town in the Pas-de-Calais, and Paris. The two
heroines Toinette Moreau and Joan Dombray, both come from St. Wulphy and
both go to Paris. Tlieir histories contrive a sharp contrast: one being by character
sweet, yielding and aHectionate. while the other is combative, rebellious and
intellectua). The character drawing, as in Mr. Goring-Thomas' other books, is
notably clear and interesting. His already celebrated wit, his original homoar,
and insight into character again illuminate his latest book. The history ol Joaa
Dombray, especially, is a Btrong, original, and striking piece of work.

8

JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION
BY HENRY HARLAND.

THE CARDIXALS SXUFF ROX. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Ulustrated by G. C. Wilmhurst. 165th. Thousand.

Aeademy—" The drawings are all excellent In style and really illostrativc of
ilic tale."

Saturday Rfvieir—" Wholly delightlul."
Pall Hall (.iazttt*-" Uaiuty and deliciotu."
Timet—" A book among a thousand."
Sptetator—" A chanuin« romance."

MY FRIEN'D PROSPERO. Crown Svo. Tliird Edition. 6/-

Timet—" There la no denying the charm of the work, the dolicjvcy and
Iragranry ot the ntyle. the Biinny play of the dialogue, tho TiTacity of the wit, and
the graceful flight o! the fancy."

U'ortd—" The reading ol it Is • pleasure rare and unalloyed."

THE L.ADY PAR.AMOUNT. Crown Svo. 55lh Thousand. 6/-

Timf$—" A faata^tic, delightlul loTe-idyll."

Sptctator—" A roseate romanc* without a crumpled roee leaf."

Daily Mail—" Charming, dainty, delightful."

COMEDIES AND ERRORS. Crown Svo. Third Edition. 6/-

Mr. Henry James, in Fortnightly Review—" Mr. IHarland has clearly thought
•ut a form. . . . lie has mastered a method and learned how to paint. . . . His
art b all alire with felicities and delicacies."

GREY ROSES. Crown Svo. Fourth Edition. 3/6 net

fJntiy Telegraph— "' Grey Rofea ' are entitled to rank among the choicest
flowers of the realms ol romance."

Sptetator—" Really delightful. ' Castles near Spain " Is as near perfection as it
eoald well be."

Daily Chroniel*—" Charming stories, simple, fall ot freshness."

MADE.MOISELLE MISS. Crown Svo. Tliird Edition. 3/6

Spiaker—" All tlirough the book we are pleased ajid entertained."
Bookman — " An Interesting collection ol early work. In It may be noted the
nadoabted delicacy and strength ol Hr. HarUnd's manner."

BY CROSBY HEATH.

H EMM FT FA TAKLNC -NOl i:.S. Crown Svo. 6/-

*«* Henrietta U tlie elefca year old daughter of a dramatic critic, who, with
her delightlul younger brother, Cyrui. are worthy ol a pl*<« beside " Helen's
Babies" or " Elliabeihs Children." They cause the "Olympians " maii> aiixloui
and anguished oiuiiienU, jret their pranks are lurgltva b«('.«u»e ol the etidearinn
charm of their generous natures. Miss Urath writes of children with the kklll that
•omes af a thorough uudcrstaoding ol the child mind.

JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION

BY BERTAL HEENEY.

PICKANOCK: A Tale of Settlement Days in Olden Canada.

Crown 8vo. 6/-

BY MURIEL HINE.

APRIL PANHASARD. A Novel. Crown 8vo. 6/-

*** Lady Essendine is reluctantly compelled to divorce her uniaithful husband,
who has developed into a dipsomaniac. She is naturally distressed by the scandal
her action carries, and flies to Coddle-in-the-Dale, where she hopes to hide her
identity under the name ol April Panhasard— a name chosen casually irom the
titles oJ three novels at a railway station bookstall, " Young April," " Peter Pan,"
" The Hazard of the Die." In the quiet village she moves a sweet and gracious
figure, serenely indifferent to the curiosity of those who try to penetrate the
mystery that surrounds her. Only Boris Majendie, who poses as her cousin, is
in her confidence. Her quiet is speedily disturbed. A young American, to whom
she is strangely drawn, makes her a proposal of marriage. Boris runs more than
a little wild, although he leaves her his larger devotion. Finally her divorced
husband turns up, and she is left in an intensely compromising situation, for the
necessary six months have not yet elapsed to make the decree absolute. How she
frees herself from this curious tangle must be left for the reader to find out.

The book is alive with incident, but it has the rare quality of restraint, which
prevents it from ever merging into the melodramatic, and the characters are all
drawn with rare artistic skill.

HALF IN EARNEST. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 6/-

*»* Derrick Kilmarney, the secretary of a famous politician, is a young man
with the disposition to take the best that life offers him, and shirk the respon-
sibilities. He falls in love with a girl, but shudders at the idea of the bondage of
marriage. His love is emancipated, unfettered. He is ambitious, politically,
allows himself to become entangled with his chief's wife, and is too indolent to
break with her even in justice to the girl he loves. Eventually there comes a
time when all the threads have to be gathered together, when love has to be
weighed with ambition, and in Kilmarney's case tlio denounement is unexpected
and startling.

EARTH. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 6/-

*„,* Muriel Hine's previous novel " Half in Earnest " achieved ft considerable
success, " Earth " seems likely to achieve a greater. The story deals with the
awakening of a pure young girl to the realities of lite and what they mean. With
a proper understanding of human nature comes sympathy: to know all is to pardoa
all. " Earth " is a society novel with a society atmosphere that is oonvincine.

BY ADELAIDE HOLT.

OUTSIDE THE ARK. Crown 8vo. 6/-

*,* This is an attractively told story with many outstanding features. Hugh
Inskip, a prominent man of letters, marries a young wife, whom he does n»t
understand, because she is continually posing and never her natural self. She
is also jealous of the beautiful but incapacitated actress, Margaret Stair, for whom
Inskip is writing a play, and makes use of an ingenious and shady trick to spy
upon her husband's motives. But Iris, the young wife, is not entirely a malignant
figure, for her frail beauty and helplessness make a tender appeal for sympathy.
The scene of the novel changes at times from the hub of London life to the
peaceful quiet of a country vicarage, whither the father ol Iris— a charming
scholar— lets fall honeyed words ol wisdom and ewlvice or gently chides his over-
zealous curate. The author has a strong sense ol humour, as well as a, grwit power
of dramatic presentment.

JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION

BY ADELAIDE HOLT -conttiiue.i.

THE VALLEY OF RKGRET. Crown 8vo. 6/-

*,• Betty Fererell's childhood is full of p&thos. For the best reason ia th«
world she is unable to capture the sympathy of her supposed father, and runs
away to make an imprudent marriage with a rery charming but rather weak young
man who is addicted to " drink." Fastidious to a degree, this tailing does not
•eem to spoil the gentleness and refinement of bis dispositiou, until, enraged by au
iainlt to bis wife, he kills a man in a fit ot alcoholic frenzy. With her husband
Mntenced to penal servitude tor seven years, the problem of Betty's life is full of
difficulty. After five years a second man, John Earle, wins her love, knowing
little or nothing ot the obstacle-s in the way of its fulfilment. Finally, news
arrives that the convict will return in a few weeks, and the story ends suddenly
and unexpectedly. This is a delightful novel. It has incident and freshness; and
th« directness of the style give« the book a remarkably artistic impression of life.

BY MRS. JOHN LANE.

KITWYK. Crown 8vo. 6/-

A Stoiy with numerous illustrations b\' Howard Pyle
Albert Sterner and George Wharton Eiowards.

Timet — " Mrs. Lane has succeeded to admiration, and chiefly by reason ol
being so much interested in her theme that she makes no coii.^cious effort to
please. . . . Everyone who seeks to be diverted will read ' Kitwyk ' for it«
obviotu qualities of entertainment."

THE CHAMrXGNE STANDARD. Crown 8vo. 6/-

iforning Pott—" The author's champagne overflows with witty sayings too
numeroiu to recite."

Pall Mall Gazette — " Mrs. Lane's papers on our social manners and foibles are
(lie most entertaining, the kindest and the truest that have been offered us tor a
long time. . . . The book shows an airy philosophy that will render it of service
to the social student."

ACCORD 1\(^. TO MARIA. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Daily Clronicf*—" This delightful novel, sparkling with humour. . . . Maria's
world in real. . . . Mrs. Lane is remarkably true to lite in that world. . . . Maria
it priceless, and Mrs. L.%ne is a satirist whose life may be indcfatigably joyous in
■satiric art. For her eyes harvest the little absurdities, and her hand makes
sheaves of them. . . . Thackeray might have made such sheaves if he had been
a woman."

BALTHASAR AND OTHER STORIES. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Translated by Mrs. JOHN Lane from the French of Anatcle France

Daily GrapKir-" The original charm and distinction of the author's style haa
survived the ditRralt ordeal ot appearing In another language. . . . ' The Cure's
Mignonette' is as ijertect in itself as some little delicate flower."

TALK O THE TOWN. Crown 8vo. 6/-

*,* .Mrs. .lohii Lane's new book, "Talk of the Town," is en tb« same Unas
as " The Champagne Standard," that sparkling and brilliantly witty study ot
I'^nglinh and An^erlcan tile, and has th* dellghtlul and refreshing humour
we have a right to ezi^ect of the author of " Ac<-ording to Maria," and that power
of observation and keen insight into everyday life which made "The Champagne
Standard" one of the most successful and ono of the most quoted books of the

an, both In England and America."

II

JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION

BY STEPHEN LEACOCK.

LITERARY LAPSES. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. 3/6 net

Spectator—" This book is a happy example ol the way in which the double
life can be lived blamelessly and to the great advantage ol the community. The
book fairly entitles Mr. Leacock to be considered not only a humourist but a
benefactor. The contents should appeal to English readers with the double virtue
that attaches to work which is at once new and richly humorous."

NONSENSE NOVELS. Third Edition. Crown 8vo.

3/6 net

Pall Mall Gazette—" He certainly bids fair to rival the immortal Lewis Carroll."

Punch—" Delightful sjKintaneity. There is genuine gold here on every page."

Daily Gra-phicr-" ' Guido, the Gimlet ol Ghent' set us in a roar. His last tale,
' The Asbestos Man,' is the best."

SUNSHINE SKETCHES OF A LITTLE TOWN. Fourth Edition

Evening Standard-

Crown 8vo.
We have never laughed more often.

3/6 net

Canada — " A whole storehouse of Eunshine. Of the same brand as ' Literary
Lapses ' and ' Nonsense Novels.' It is the surest recipe tor enjoyiog a happy
holiday."

Daily Telegraph — " Irresistibly comical. Mr. Leacock strikes us as a sort ol
Americanised W. W. Jacobs. Like the English humorist, the Canadian one has
a delightfully fresh and amusing way of putting things."

Times—" His real hard work— for which no conceivable emolument would be
a fitting reward— is distilling sunshine. This new book is full of it— the sunshine
of humour, the thin keen sunshine of irony, the mellow evening sunshine of
sentiment."

BY W. J. LOCKE.

STELLA MARIS.

A Novel.

Crown Svo.

6/-

With 8 Illustrations by Frank Wiles.

*,* Mr. Locke's astonishing fertility of invention has never yet been seen to
•o great advantage as in this story. It has all the picturesque bravery of the
"Beloved Vagabond," all the tender sentiment of "Marcus Ordeyne," all the
quixotic spirit of " Clementina Wing." And yet it is like none of these. Infinitely
tender, infinitely impressive, is the story of Stella Maris, the wonder child, who
has never moved from her couch, who receives her impressions of the outside
world from her gentle spirit and the gold-clad tales of her loving friends and the
secrets of the seagulls that flit so near her window. And then Stella, grown to
a woman, recovers; to take her place, not in the world of beauty she had pictured
from the stillness of her couch, but the world of men and women.

From the first page the reader falls under a spell. For all its wistful delicacy
ol texture Mr. Locke's humanity, broad and strong, vibrates with terror just m
it soothes with its sense of peace. This is Mr. Locke's finest achievement.

12

JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION

BY W. J. LOCKE -c(j«//H;/f./.

THE JOYOUS AnX'KNTURRS OF ARISTIDK Pl'IOL. A Novel

Crown t)VO. 6/-

With Illustrations by Alec Bull.

Daily TeJfgraph — " In ' Aristide Pujol ' Mr. W. J. Locke ha* giren lila to one
oj th« moBl laicinating creatures id modern fiction."

Morning Pott—" We do not know when Mr. Locke was more happily inspired."
MH:i<K1,1CTS. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Daily Ctironicle—" Mr. Locke tell$ his story in a very true, very moving, and
very noble book. II anyone can read the la«t chapter with dry eyes we shall b«
■nrpri'^cd. ' Derelicta ' is an impressive &nd important book."

Morning Poit~" Mr. Locke's clever novel. One ol the most efleotive ttorie*
that have appeared (or eome time past."

'IDOI-S. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Daily Telegraph — " A brilliantly written and eminently readable book."
Daily Mail— " One ol the most distinguished novels of the present book season."
Puncft—" The Baron strongly recommends Mr. W. .J. I-ooke's "Idols' to aJI

Dovel readers. It is well written. No time is wasted in superfluoui dcbcriptions;

there is no fine writing tor fine writing's sake, but the story will absorb the

reader. ... It is a novel that, once taken up, cannot willingly be put down

until finished."

*A STUDY IN SHADOWS. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Daily Chrun\cl»—" Mr. Ix)cke has achieved a distinct success in this novel
He ba$ struck many emotional chords and struck them all with a firm sure hand."

Alhtnaeum—" Tb^ cbaracter^drawtng is distinctly good. All the persono^fes
stand well defined with strongly marked Individualitiea."

'THK Wnrrr: D0\1:. Crown 8vo. 6/-

r«m«»— " An interesting story, lull of dramatic scenes."

Morning Pott—" An interesting story. The characters are strongly conceived
and vividly presented, and the dramatic moments axe powerlnlly realised."

•Tin: USURl'KR. Crown 8vo. 6/-

If'or^d— " This quite anoommon noveL"

Sptelalor—" Character aJDd plot are most iu^eniously wrought, *nd the eonolu-
uon, when It comes, is tnlly satisfying."
Timti—" An Itnprealve romance."

THK DKMAGOCiUE AND LADY PHAYRE. Cr. 8vo. 3/6
•A'l THK f..\TK Ol- S.X.MARIA. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Ijiiiiy I'hronicl*-" Tlie bcruiiie ul this clever story attracts our interest. .
bliS u a ciefcr aud tublle study. . . . We oongralulate Mr. Locke."

Morntno Pott—" A cleverly written tale . . . the author's picture
Dobeiniaa Lie are bright and graphic."

«3

JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION

BY W. J. LOCKE— continued.
•WHERE LOVE IS. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Mr. James Douglas, in Star — " I do not often praise a book with tlil»
exultant gusto, but it gave me so much spiritual stimulus and moral pleasure that
I feel bound to snatch the additional delight of commending it to those readen
who long for a novel that is a piece of literature as well as a pieco of life."

Standard—" A brilliant piece of work."

Times— " The author has the true gift; his people are alive."

*THE MORALS OF MARCUS ORDEYNE. Cr. 8vo. 6/-

Mr. C. K. Shorter, in Sphere—" A book which has just delighted my heart."
Truth—" Mr. Locke's new novel is one of the best artistic pieces of work I

have met with for many a day."

Daily Chronicle—" Mr. Ix)cke succeeds, indeed, in every crisis of this most

original story."

THE BELOVED VAGABOND. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Truth—" Certainly it is the most brilliant piece of work Mr. Locke has done."
Evening Standard—' Mr. Locke can hardly fail to write beautifully. He ha»
not failed now."

SIMON THE JESTER. Crown Svo. 6/-

*»* The central figure of Mr. Locke's new novel is one Simon de Gex, M.P.,
who having met life with a gay and serene philosophy is suddenly called upon to
face Death. This he does gallantly and jests at Death until he discovers to hi«
confusion that Destiny is a greater jester than he. Eventually by surrendering
his claims he attains salvation. The heroine is trola Brandt, an ex-trainer of
animals, and an important figure in the story is a dwarf. Professor Anastasiu*
Papadopoulas, who has a troupe of performing cats. The scene of the novel i«
laid in London and Algiers.

THE GLORY OF CLEMENTINA WING. Crown Svo. 6/-

06scri;«r— " Mr. Locke's best. . . . Clementina Wing and Dr. Quixtus are th*
two most adorable characters that Mr. Locke has ever brought together in holy
wedlock. The phrases are Locke's most debonairly witty."

*Also Bound in Clolh with Illustrated paper wrappei i/- net.

BY LAURA BOGUE LUFFMAN.

A QUESTION OF LATITUDE. Crown Svo. 6/-

*»* The author of " A Question of Latitude " takes an English girl from th»
eomtortable stateliness of a country house in the Old Country, and places her in a
rough and ready environment in Australia. The girl finds her standard of values
undergoing a change. She learns to distinguish between English snobbery and
Colonial simplicity and manliness, she also learns how to wash up dishes, and that
Australia is not all kangaroos and giant cricketers. The atmosphere of the story i»
convincing, and there are many vivid pictures of Melbourne life. The book depict*
Australia as it really is, its strength and its weakness, its refinement and it»
vulgarity.

14

JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION
BY A. NEIL LYONS.

ARTHURS. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Timfa — " Not only a very entertaining and amusing work, but a very kindly
and tolerant work also. Incidentally the work is a mirror of a phase of the low-
London lile ot to-day as true as certain ot Hogarth's transcripts in the eighteenth
century, and lar mora tender."

Punch—" Mr. Neil Lyons seems to get right at the heart o( things, and I
confess to a real admiration lor thi3 philosopher ot the coUee-€taIl."

SIXPEN.W PIECES. Crown Svo. 6/-

I'uU Mail Gazette—" It is pure, last, sheer life, salted with a sense of humour."

Eceiiing Standard— "' Sixpenny Pieces' is as good as 'Arthur's,' and that

it saying a great deal, A book lull of laughter and tears and hits innumerable

that one leels impelled to read aloud. 'Sixpenny Pieces' would bo Tery bard

indeed to beat."

COTT.VC'.K rii:. Crown Svo. 6/-

•,* Mr. Lyons' lormer books dealt with East London characters. Now he
djaws the Tarying types of a small country community. The humour ot the
whole is enforced, inimitable, and there is the underlying note of tragedy never
wholly absent from the lives ot the poorer classes.

W. J. Locke, in Outlook-" . . . That book ot beauty, truth, and artistry."
Edwin Pugii, in Outlook-" I have never missed an opportunity to express my
admiration for his inimitable talent."

CLARA; SOME CHAPTERS IX THE LIFE OF A HUSSY.

Crown Svo. 6/-

Jlancherter Guardian—" Mr. Lyons writes about lile in the slums with a
great deal of penetrative sympathy for human nature as it shows itsell."

Daily Graphic— " Clira, is a type, the real thing, and we know ot no-one el«»
who could have created her.''

BY ALLAN McAULAY.

THE EAGLES NEST, Crown Svo. 6/-

Alhtiurtiiii—" We 6h<jiild describe the book as a brilliant tour de force. . .
The story ii spirited and interesting. The love interest also is excellent and
pathetic."

Spectator— " Thii is one ot those illuminating and stimulating romances which
Mt people reading history."

BEGGARS AND SORN'ERS. Crown Svo. 6/-

•,• " UcKK-^rs and Sori:<:r» " ia a novel which deals with what may be called the
ba/-k-wash of the " Forty Five." It commemorates the dfbdcl» of a great romance,
and in describing the lives, the struggles, the makeshifts, the intriguej and the
crimes ol a small circle of Jacobite exile* in Holland between the years 1745 and
17S0, it strives to show the pathos ol history while revealing its teamy side. The
cliaracter* are imacinary (with one im|>ortant exception); they have imaginary
names and oommit imaginary actions, for the story i> not confined to, but only
loanded on, fact. If some readers of Jacobite history find among their number
some old (riendt with new faces, this need not detract from the interest of other*
to whom all the characters are new— actors in a drama drawn Irom the novelist's
(v . /. To Eiigllih readers It may have to be explained what the word Sorner
tr .T,v— but the story makes this lumciently plain. The novel is ol a lighter
khaiacirr than those previously written by this author, and it it not without
%i-.. .i> tonal elements. In spite ot adverse circumstances, grim character!, and all
tli<; f-.rr'.wn of a lost cause. It contrives to end happily. The scene is laid la
An: '<T<1 irs.

IS

JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION

BY KARIN MICHAELIS.

THE DANGEROUS AGE. Crown 8vo. 3/6 net

Translated from the Danish.

This book has been:—

(1) Sold to the extent ot 100 editions in 6 months in Germany.

(2) Translated into 11 languages.

(3) Translated into French by the great Marcel Prkvost, who says in his
Introduction to the English Edition—" It is the feminine soul, and the femininal
rtoul of all that is reyealed in these extraordinary documents. Here indeed is a
strange booli."

ELSIE LINDTNER. A Sequel. Crown Svo. 3/6 net

THE GOVERNOR. Crown Svo. 3/6 net

BY IRENE MILLER.

SEKHET. Crown Svo. 6/-

*»• Sekhet deals with that topic ot unwearying interest to readers ot romance—
the adventures and struggles of an exquisitely lovely woman upon whom the
hand of Fate is laid heavily. From the days of her beautiful girlhood when her
Guardian himself proves her tempter, Evarne has good reason to believe hersell
one of the victims of " Sekhet," the ancient Egyptian Goddess of Love and Cruelty.
Even though the main theme of this story is the tragic outcome ot a too passionate
love, portions ot Evarne's experiences, such as those with the bogus Theatrical
manager, are full of humour, and throughout there is a relieving lightness of touch
in the writing. The book grows in interest as it proceeds, and the final portion —
a long duel between Evarne and the evil genius of her life— is dramatic in the
extreme. The result remains uncertain till the last page or two, and though
decidedly ghastly is entirely original and unforeseen.

BY HECTOR H. MUNRO (Saki)

THE UNBEARABLE BASSINGTON. A Novel. Crown Svo. 6/-

*,* The keynote of this book is struck in an early chapter where one of the
•chool-masters at the school " Comus Bassingtou " is sent to, remarks, " Ther«
are just a few, and Bassington is one of them, who are Nature's highly-finished
products. They are in the schoolboy stage, and we who are supposed to b«
moulding raw material are quite helpless when we come in contact with them."
" Comus Bassington " has no father, and a mother oi a very uncommon type.
After leaving school he runs loose for a time in London, bear-led a little by a
clever young M.P., falls in love with the most wonderful match ot the season,
gets deeply in debt, and even when at the absolute end ot his tether fascinates
the reader with his store of spontaneous gaiety.

Observer—" ANYONE COULD DINE out tor a year and pass for a wit after
reading this book it only the hosts and the guests would promise not to read it
too. This is one ot the wittiest books, not only of the year, but ot the decade.
It is not even only witty; it has a deepening humanity towards the end that
comes to a climax ot really disturbing pathos. It will be a dull public that can
vasa over such a book as this."

16

JOHN LAxNE'S LIST OF FICTION

BY HECTOR H. MUNRO \Sa.]!ii)— con t:,i„cH.

THE CHROXICLES OF CLOVIS. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Eiiglifh iiVpiVir— " A collection ol short stories printed from various news-
papers and ma azines. Every one was worth reprinting, and some, notably ' The
Great Weep ' aud ' Sredni Vaehtar,' are rery clever indeed. Mr. Munro conceala
pills of cleverness in a sugar-ooating ol wit— real wit— and the result is a chuckle
piovoking book, except on the occasions when its author was touched to grim
realism and wrote his mood."

BY LOUIS N. PARKER

POM.WDER W.VLK. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Author oi' "Rosemary," etc. With numerous Illustrations by

J. Scott Williams.

*,* Novelised by the author of the delightful play of the same name, which haa
met with so much success both in England and the United States. A picture of
one of the quaint out-of-the-way corners of I^ondon of the olden times. The volume
contains a tinted troatispiece &nd title page, and numerous other charming
illtutiationa.

Daily Tflegraph—" Mr. Parker ha-s turned a delightful comedy into a still
more delighLful story ... in every way a (.harmiiig, happy iouiai.ce, beautifully
told and irreeistibly sentimental."

BY JOHN PARKINSON.

OTHER L.AWS. Crown 8vo. 6/-

•,* This book is distinctly the outcome of the latest " intellectual " movement
in novel-writing. The hero, Hawkins, is an African explorer. During a holiday In
Ensland he falls in love with and captivates Caroline Blackwood, a woman of
strong personality. Circumstances prevent him from entering upon a formal
engagement, and he departs again for Africa, without proposing marriage. Caroline
and Hawkins correspond fitfully for some time; but then a startling combinatioa
of events causes Hawkins to penetrate further and farther into the interior; a
native village is burred, and a report, based apparently upon fact, is circulated
of his death. Not until seven months have elapsed is be able to return to England.
Be finds Caroline married to a man who has found her money useful. Here the
story, strong and moving throughout, moves steadily to the close, describing
delicately and ana!yii''a)ly the soul conflict of a man ajid a woman, sundered and
separate, with a yearning for each other's love.

BY F. INGLIS POWELL.

THE SNAKE Crown 8vo. 6/-

*.* For rountleM generations the soul of Peasant India has been steeped ia
weird, fantastic supenlltiunj, tome grotesque, some loathsome, all strangely
laKsinatlng. Though the main tlifiiie of (his story is the unhappy love of a
beautiful, evil woman, and the brutal frankness witb which she writes of her
unoontrolled panrtoris in her diary, yd the whole tale binges on some ol the meet
gruesome sut>r'^^ti'.loIU of the East. This book should appeal to all who take ao
Interest in the t'ringe beliefs— not <•( the educated rlanes— but of the slmpl*-
mloded and Ignorant peMints of Behar.

«7

JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION
BY F. J. RANDALL.

LOVE AND THE IRONMONGER. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Daily Telegraph—" Since the gay days when Mr. F. Anstey was writing his
inimitable series of humourous novels, we caji recall no book o! purely farcical
imagination so full of excellent entertainment as this first effort of Mr. F. J.
Randall. ' Love and the Ironmonger ' is certain to be a success."

Times — " As diverting a comedy of errors as the reader is likely to meet with
lor a considerable time."

Mr. Clement Shorter, in The Sphere—" I thank the author for a delightful
hour's amusement."

THE BERMONDSEY TWIN. Crown 8vo. 6/-

*.^* A humourous story of the reappearance of a twin brother, who is supposed
to be dead. Prosperous, respected, and well satisfied with himself, a suburban
tradesman is contemplating matrimony and the realisation of his ambitions, when
the twin brother appears. He is thrown into a state of panic, for not only is
his fortune thus reduced by half and his marriage prospects endangered, but the
twin is to all appearance a disreputable character, whose existence threatens to
mar the tradesman's respectability. The good man's attempts to hide this
undesirable brother make amusing reading, and the pranks of the unwelcome twin
serve to complicate matters, for the brothers are so much alike as to be easily
mistaken one for the other. The new arrival is really a man of integrity, his
depravity being assumed as a joke. Having played the farce out he is about to
" confess," when the tables are turned upon him by accident, and he is forced to
pay heavily for his fun in a series of humiliating adventures.

BY HUGH DE SELINCOURT.

A FAIR HOUSE. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Author of "A Boy's Marriage," *'The Way Thing.s Happen," "The

Strongest Plume."

*,* The oul standing idea of Mr. Hi-.gh de S^lincourt's new novel is the
possibility of absolute love and confidence between father and daughter. It fs the
main thread of the story and all the incidents are subordinated to it. The book
falls naturally into three sections. The first opens with the birth of the daughter
and the death of the mother, the father's utter despair, until an idea comes to
him, to make the child his masterpiece and to see how much one human being can
mean to another. The second deals with the growth of the child from five to
fifteen. In the third, the girl becomes a woman. Her first experience of love is
unhappy and threatens to destroy the confidence between father and daughter.
But she is enabled to throw herself heart and soul into stage-work, and in the
excitement of work she finds herself again. And the end of the book leaves her
with the knowledge that one love does not necessarily displace another, and that a
seoond, happier love has only strengthened the bond between her father and
herseli.

BY ESSEX SMITH

WIND ON THE HEATH. Crown 8vo. 6/-

*,* No paragraph or descriptive note can give an idea of Miss Essex Smith's
story. It depends upon style, psychology, woodland atmosphere, and more than
ajiything else upon originality of outlook. It will make a direct appeal to that
public that has a taste for the unusual. There is underlying it a tone of passion,
the passion of a fantastic Richard Jefteries.

I8

JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION
BY GEORGE STEVENSON.

TOPHAM'S FOLLY. A Novel. Crown S\o. 6/-

•,• This novel has the cnrious charm of a lale that might be told to you by
your own mother or grandmother, a homeliness and 6iraplici(y which is never
orerweigbted by the writer's very considerable skill in presenting his •tory. Th«
•oene is laid in a smaJl town in the West Riding ol Yorkshire — fortunately there
is practically no dialect. What the narrator presents to us is supposed to bo the
incidents of the lives of various members of the Topham family and their kin.sIoIk
•een largely through the eyes of Mary Ann. Mary Ann's mother was a woman
of good family, who in her early teens eloped with her father's groom, and although
in consequence of her act she endured many hardships, she never repented it.
When Mary Ann was just growing into young womanhood she discovered an
advertisement in a newspaper enquiring for the heirs of Thomas Morton Bagster,
and ixnntcd it out to her mother. They consult Mr. Tophiim. the lawyer, who
nnde.takcs to make enquiries for them. Topham is at this time very short of
caah, and cannot complete a grand new house for him!«1f and his family, over
whom he rules as a petty domestic tyrant. From now on the financial foitunea
of the Tophams prosper, and the house, which has begun to be known a«
" Topham's Folly," is completed and occup-id. And in this tempestuous household
lives Mury Ann as a humble servant— a kii.d of angel in a print dress. When th«
youngcit boy is about twenty he suddenly discovers hy the purest chance the
whole fraud upon which the family fortunes have been erected. There are
innumerable side issues, every one of them fascinatingly human and delightfully
toid.

BY HERMANN SUDERMANN.

THE SONG OF SOXGS (Das Hohe Lied). Crown 8vo. 6/-

A new Translation by Beatrice Marshall.

•,• The flnt English translation of this work, published under the title of
The Song of Songs." proved to be too American for the taste of the British
public, and was evcafually dropped. But it was felt that the work was too great
an one not to be rerrc^enicd in the English language, and accordingly this entirely
new translation has lieen made, which it is hoped will fairly represent the wonderfitl
original without unduly offending the susceptibilities of the British public. In
lhl» colossal novel, Sudcrmann has made a searching and masterly study of feminine
irailty. The character and career of Lily Czepanck are depicted with such pililcs*
power and uricrrinR psychological insight, that the portrait would be almost
Jntolerable in its r'ili»ra. if it were not for its touches of humour and tendernesa.
In these pages too may be found some of Sudormann's mo^t characteristic and
charming psasage* descriptive of country life, while hti picture* of Berlin Society
in all iu phaies. the gllinpsei he gives us into what goes on beneath the tinsel,
■pick and span surface of the great modern capital are drawn with Tolstoyaa
vigour and colour.

THE INDL\N LILY and other Stories. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Translated l>y Ludwig Lewisohn, M.A.

•,• A terlcs of characlerlMic stories by the great German Master which eihlbit
uit art in every pha-e. Sudermann is chiefly known In this country as a writer
ol novels and of plays, but thU volume will place him In a new light for Engllth
r«ad«r*-as a writer of »hort stories of the first rank. In fact he may with Justice
be termed the German Maapassant.

'9

JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION
BY SIR FRANK SWETTENHAM.

ALSO AND PERHAPS. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Author of " Unaddrcssed Letters," "British Malaya," etc.

Punch—" ' Dodo Island ' contains a long quotation of such genuine humour
that to have rescued it is an achievement in itseU. Although in this sietch Sir
Frank apologises almost humbly lor mentioning history in ' Tamarin ' and ' lie d«
la Passe.' he becomes an historian unashamed, and a most attractive one. ' The
Kris Incarnadine ' provided me with a more grizzly sen.sation than I have been
able to conjure up for many years, and ' Disbelief in the Unseen ' ought to be
read aloud daily to those objioxious people who cannot bring themselves to believe
ia anything that does not take place within a stone's throw of their parish pump."

BY MARCELLE TINAYRE.

THE SHADOW OF LOVE. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Translated from the French by A. R. Allinson, M.A.

*t* Of the newer French novelists Marcelle Tinayre is perhaps the best known.
Her work has been crowned by the French Academy, and she possesses a very large
public in Europe and in America. The story deals with a girl's love and a heroic
Bacrifice dictated by love. " The Shadow of Love " is a book of extraordinary
power, uncompromising in its delineation of certain hard, some might say repulsive
facts of life, yet instinct all through with an exquisitely tender and beautiful
passion of human interest and human sympathy.

BY GEORGE YANE.

THE LIFTED LATCH: A Novel. Crown 8vo. 6/-

»,* " The Lifted Latch " is a story of strong situations. The hero is the son
of an Italian attach^ and a girl of whose frailty he takes advantage. The mother
decides to hide her shame by handing the child over to a foster-mother together
with a sum of money for its maintenance. When the boy grows up he becomes by
a curious sequence of events and circumstances reunited to his parents, and a
ieries of plots and counterplots follow. The scene is set principally in diplomatic
circles in Rome.

THE LOVE DREAM. Crown 8vo. 6/-

*** In this book we meet some Sicilians of old lineage and considerable wealth
settled in a gloomy manor in England. The family consists of an aged and partly
demented Princess, obsessed by a monomania for revenge, her grandson, an attach^
of the Italian Embassy to the Court of St. James, and his hall sister, a fascinating,
winnins, wayward and fickle creature. This girl captures the heart of Lord Drury—
whose father murdered the Principe Baldassare di Monreale — son of the old Princess.
The contrast between these Southerners and their English neighbours is strongly
accentuated. Don Siorza and his half sister Donna Giacinta are no mere puppets
with Italian names ; they give the reader the impression of being people the author
has met and drawn from life. The tragedy in which they are involved strikes one
OS inevitable. Poor Lord Drury, in his utter inexperience, has taken a beautiful
chimsera for reality and st.arts in the pursuit of happiness when it was all the
time within his grasp. The love-interest never flags to the last page when the hero'*
troubles oome to an end. The glimpses of diplomatic circles in. London are
obviously not written by an outsider.

Truth—" Well constructed . . . thrilling scenes and situations fit naturally
end consequently into the hamework of its elaborate plot."

20

JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION

BY CLARA YIEBIG.

THE SON' OF HIS MOTHER. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Traiislaled by H. Kuahauge.

•,• When Paul and Kate Schlieben leav» their home in Berlin and start on
their wanderings. 'Ucy bare no idea of how momentous an occasion this will be for
th«E.-B:id another. A devoted couple, there is one thing wanting to complete
their happiness, and Kate at least can never forget that they are childless. After-
wards, when they have adopted a son, ehe Isarns too late that all the c\re that
ha< been expended on him is a poor substitnte for the ties that bind mother and
child, and is forced to acknowledge that the eon of her adoption is and alwayi
mnsi be the sou of his mother.

ABSOLUTION. Crown 8vo. 6/-

rim««—" There if considerable strength in 'Absolution.' . . . A» a realistio
study the story has much merit."

Daily Telegraph-" The tale is powerfully told . . . the tale will prove
absorbing wi'h its minute characterisation and real passion."

OUR D.AILY BRE.\D. Crown 8vo. n/-

Athen<Fum~" The s\vTy is not only of great hirnan interest, but also extremely
valuable as a study of the conditions in which a h^rge section of the poorer classes
and small tradespeople of German cities spend their lives. Clara Viebig manipu-
lates her material with extraordinary vigour. . . . Her characters are alive."

BY H. B. MARRIOTT WATSON.

THE TOMBOY .AND OTHERS. Crown Svo. 3/b net

Author of " Galloping Dick."

BY H. G. WELLS.

THE NEW M.\CHIA\ELLI. Crown Svo. 6/

Also Bound 111 Cloth with Ulu.strated paper wrapper i/- net.

•»• The Xeic ilachiavelli U the longe>it, most carefully and elaborately
ooDstrncted and m'-st ambitious novel that Mr. Wells has yet written. It combines
much of the breadth and variety of TonoBungay with that concentrated unity
ol effect which makes Lot* and Mr. Lficmham. artUtically, his most satisfactory
work. It ha* the autobiographical form which he has already used so effectively
in Tono-Bnngay, but this time the hero who surveys and experiences the
▼iciultudes of otir modern world is not a commercial adventurer but a Trinity man,
who diiecta very great ambitions and abilities to politiral end.<^. who is wrecked
In mid<areer aiid driven into exile by a passionate luve adventure. From his
retirement in Italy he reviews and discusses his broken life. The story he tells
opens auiidit suburban turroundings, and the first book giveji a f^erie« of vivid
Impreasioiis and criticisms of English public school and university life. Thence,
after an episode in Staffordshire, it pa«aes to the world of Wektminster and the
ooontry house. The narrator recounts hi* relations with the varying groups and
forcas iu contemporary parliamentary life and political Journaliiun in l^ondon,
and the growth and r)ianges in hiii own opinion until the emotions of his paasiona'e
entanglement sweey the nlory away to its sonibre and touching conc'iuslon. In
addition to the full-length portraits of Margaret, the neglected wile— perhaps the
finmt ol Mr. WelU'> feminine creations— Isabel Riverv and Kenilnglon, there
are soorei ol sharply differentiated r Ijaracters. sketciiod aiiU vignittcJ: Roinlngton
the father, Britten, the Intriguing Haileys, the nieriiber»i of the )'r;ita<rain Circle.
Codger the typical don. and Mr. F.ve»lism the Conservatlvo I«i<lrr. It ii a b<ol(
to read and read again, a'ld an filiring pii: urf of 'oittitnporary Knglish eoudltioas.

JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION

BY MARGARET WESTRUP.

ELIZABETH'S CHILDREN. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Baily Telecjraph—" The book is charming . . . the author . . . has a delicate

fanciful touch, a charming imagination . . . skilfully suggests character and

moods ... is bright and witty, and writes about children with exquisite know-
ledge and sympathy."

HELEN ALLISTON. Crown 8vo.

-■/-

Pall Mall Gazette—" The book has vivacity, fluency, colour, more than a touch
of poetry and passion. . . . We shall look forward with Interest to future work
by the author of ' Helen AUiston." "

THE YOUNG O'BRIENS. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Saturday Revieto—" Delightful . . . the author treats them (the Young
O'Briens) very skilfully."

PHYLLIS IN MIDDLEW^CH. Crown Svo. 6/-

*,* It is some years since " Elizabeth's Children " was published and
immediately ran through edition after edition. In her new book the author shows
that same sympathetic touch and sure knowledge of the real child that stamped
" Elizabeth's Children " as a live book. The doings and misdoings of Phyllis are
told with understanding and with numerous and deft touches the littJe
idiosyncracies of the Middlewichites are admirably hit off.

ELIZABETH IN RETREAT. Crown Svo. 6/-

Ladies' Field—" Margaret Westrup has never written a more interesting novel
than ' Elizabeth in Retreat.' "

Punch—" All the superstition having long ago been used up and squandered
among the undeserving, it is difficult to hit upon such an expression of praise as
the reading public will take without a pinch of salt. But the character of Evelyn
VVinkfield is a stroke of genius. Believe me or not as you please, but this is the
best novel of the year that has come my way."

BY EDITH WHERRY.

THE RED LANTERN: Being the Story ol the Goddess of the

Red Light. Crown Svo. 6/-

*,* The most exciting novel of recent years. It deals with the Rebellion in
China and is of extraordinary anticipation. Sun Yat Sen is vividly depicted under
the name of Sam Wang in Miss Edith Wherry's startling novel.

22

JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION

BY IDA WILD.

ZQF: the DANXER Crown 8vo 6/-

•,* The scene ol the story is laid in Brussels, where Zoe. little more than &
child, shows her remark&ble aptitude lor dancing. Her wonderful yellow hair
secures (or her a position in a bairdr&'^ser's window to the constant delight of the
good citiiens. Chance leads to her adoption of dancing as a profession. The book
is lull of comedy and tragedy, .<ind yet it is the charm and originality of the telling
which holds the reader throughout."

BY M. P. WILLCOCKS.

WIDDICOMBE. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Evtninri Standard—" Wonderfully alire and pulsating with a curious lerTour
which brings round the reader the very atmosphere which the author describee.
... A fine, rather unusual novel. . . . There are some striking studies of women."

Truth—" A first novel ol most unusual promise."

Qt/«#n— " An unusually clever book."

THE WINGLESS VICTORY. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Timei—" Such bc^ks arc worth keeping on the shelves even by the classics,
for they are painted in colours that do not fade."

Daily Telegraph—" A novel of such power as should win for its author a
poaition in the front rank of contemporary writers of fiction."

A .MAX OV C.K.Ml'S. Crown 8vo. 6/

Dailtf Teleffraph—" ' Widdicombe ' was good, and ' The Wingless Victory '
was perhaps better, but In ' A Man of Genius ' the author has given us something
that should assure her place in the front rank of our living novelists. In this
latest novel there is so much of character, so much ol incident, and to its writing
has gone so much insight and observation that it is not easy to praise it without
seeming exaggeration."

PuncJi—' There is no excuse for not reading ' A Man of Genius ' and making
a short stay in the ' seventh Devon of delight.' "

Olob9-" Exquisite."

THE WAY UP. Crown 8vo. 6/-

TJatlij Mail-' It b admirably done . Evidently worth reading, lull of

extremely clever charactrrisation, of sharp and picturesque oonira.it« in personality
... a merciiSM exhibition of almos*. all the follies known as loodern thought."

WINGS OF DESIRE. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Dailu Telegraph - Excellent as are her earlier novels. Miss Wllteocks has
given OS nothing else so good, so lull at once of character, thought, and observa-
lion."

Obttrv*r—" Alt tb«s« are baiuitlng people, memorable and uiicomu**."

JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION

BY F E. MILLS YOUNG-

MYLES CALTHORPE, I.D.B. A Novel. Crown 8vo. 6/

*t* Miss Young jtgain takes Soiith Africa as a background for her vigorous
work. Myles Calthorpe is a man of original will power and somewhat perverted
•trength of characler, which is apt to land him into quixotic diiRcuItie?. To him
is applied the title of I.D.B. , the South African abbreviation for Illicit Diamond
Buyer. Nevertheless he is not guilty of the crime, but is trapped unconsciously
into acting as go-between. Caught red-handed by the Government authorities, he
is sentenced to three years' imprisonment because he will not purchase his
acquittal by throwing a smirch on the good fame ol the brother of the lady who
has won his heart. After serving his unjust sentence Myles is face to face with
ruin, and how eventually he emerges from the highways and byeways of disgrace
clean-hearted and with his hands stained by nothing more shameful than hard
work, forms the subject of a picturesque and life-pulsating romance.

GRIT LAWLESS. A Novel. Crown 8vo. 6/-

Sunday Timis—" One of the most thrilling stories of adventure we have come
across this season . . . four excellent studies of character . . . all interesting
persons palpitating alive."

WesLminster Gazeite — " Vigorous ajid full of exciting incident."

SAM'S KID. A Novel. Crown 8vo. ej-

MISTAKEN MARRIAGE. A Novel. Crown Bvo. 6/-

CHIP. A Novel. Crown Bvo. 6/-

ATONEMENT. A Novel. Crown 8vo. 6/-

POPULAR CHEAP EDITIONS,

Bound in Cloth with Illustrated Coloured Wrapper.
Crown 8vo. i/- net.

THE NEW MACHIAVELLI. By H. G. Wells. ,

NOVELS BY W. J. LOCKE.

DERELICTS.

THE USURPER.

WHERE LOVE IS.

THE WHITE DOVE.

THE MORALS OF MARCUS ORDEYNE.

AT THE GATE OF SAMARIA.

IDOLS.

A STUDY IN SHADOWS.

«4

)

93

THE LIBRARY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Santa Barbara
Goleta, California

THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE
STAMPED BELOW.

20m-3,'59(A552s4)476

^ '^205oVdLlll I

01918

9479

UC SOUTHFRN RF^,l^^Al I iRHiQv tAri, ,tv

A A 000 329 448 5

: i

niinHittmnHniifi HtntiiinninitiitHtinii